


Introduction to Quantum Theory

by mexicanspeedwagon



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen, New Game Plus, OC Time, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Suicidal Ideation, The Cleaner (Persona 5) - Freeform, akechi begrudgingly says yutaba rights, akechi goro's social links, akechi's no good very bad groundhog day from hell, apologies to franny choi for what im about to do to her poetry, gratuitous mentions of akechi's canon food blog, im actually fondly calling it new game minus. akechi's life sucks., mentions of akechi's extensive collection of featherman merchandise, p5 protag's name is joker., passive akeshu cause akechi's gay but joker dated everyone at least once
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:01:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 52,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22066678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mexicanspeedwagon/pseuds/mexicanspeedwagon
Summary: This is an incomplete list.  It has been abridgedfor your comfort.       I could tell youabout the many universes in which bad thingshappen to people other than the peopleyou love.Akechi dies at the start.
Relationships: Akechi Goro & Everyone, Akechi Goro & Igor, Akechi Goro & Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 10
Kudos: 70





	1. THE SOUND OF METAL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello and welcome. this was supposed to be a oneshot i wrote in may and now it's the prologue to like 50,000 words of a very wild ride. i am aggressively avoiding royal spoilers-- apologies in advance for having my hcs crushed by atlus fjdskl. no royal spoilers please !!
> 
> a lot of bad things happen to akechi over time, so im gonna go ahead and do a rolling CW by chapter to be safe. chapter 1 has canon typical violence !

[NOVEMBER 20TH]  
  
In the face of a death that could only have been his own, Joker's lips parted silently. The silencer waved in his direction, steady as the hand that held it, of course. Akechi must have said something grand, by how it reflected off the shine in his eyes, but Hell if he could hear it over himself— Finally, a victory, hand-delivered to him in a neat little box. The guard's death was collateral, the fact that he taints the room and the record probably the only blemish on the whole thing, but isn't a murder-suicide that much spicier?   
  
_Akechi-kun, how do you_ _think it happened?  
  
_Joker's eyes had widened, as if he'd expected a last second retraction, but neither of them were so naive. What was that, exactly? Fear, anticipation? Pointless, Akechi thought, the finale firework turned out a dud after all. The bang was silent.  
  
He sat up straighter. Stared Akechi in the eye.   
  
And he fell.  
  
_Are you disappointed with the results?  
  
_The approach was slow, despite the show of splatter on the table, spreading in a creep. This was decidedly a corpse, _the_ corpse, dead sleeves hold no tricks. He bled.  
  
The silencer poked Joker gently. He'd never smiled, which was probably the biggest shame of them all. He bled.  
  
“What the HELL did you do!?”  
  
The last shot is the one that hurt, bounced back into his wrist, but nonetheless the bullet whipped into Niijima's chest reflexively. Akechi knew he'd missed the mark when she managed to stagger at him. He stepped politely out of the way so she could slam her palms on the table, in the puddling blood. Her back was to him, her eyes were on _him_ , that they were still somehow going to play the charade of workplace relation out was amazing in itself. She'd been checking up on him and… _Was_ she that stupid all along? Reap what you sow. “Whatever could you mean, Sae-san?”  
  
Niijima Sae wouldn't be walking out of here, but this was again unfortunate. He'd have to wait for her slumping finish. Foolish of Akechi to think—  
  
She interrupted him, by either wheezing or laughing. “Akechi.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
He would not be gotten the better of, his beloved boss does not get the luxury of his true face so late in the game. Niijima raised a shaking, bloody finger, probably back at the security camera. Imagine the news, clawing for that already-deleted footage in real time.  
  
“Oh! Don't worry, I'm sure they'll catch him.” The silencer slipped into Akechi's breast pocket, easy as the mask on his bloody face, “After all, he's not going anywhere.”  
  
Niijima Sae was no longer the facsimile of a threat she was before, so it was a comfortable thing, slipping in next to her, slipping the gun into Joker's hand, catching one last glimpse of her face for the road, the four spattered steps to the door. “Goodbye.”  
  
“Hey— !?!”  
  
The voice in front of him startled him almost as much as the resounding bang— 

***

“It appears you have died.”

The old man hanged from the wrists today, suspended eerily from the gallows. His head tilted, as if the blood dribbling from Akechi’s chest was common weather.  
  
“I have.”  
  
And wasn't it? Akechi Goro has graced the blue dust before, life poured from the vessel before their very eyes until there was nothing left. The execution yard sees its share. He sat up from the graceless slump that being shot had left him in.  
  
“Will you abandon the—”  
  
“No.” Akechi sat on his hands in the thin dirt, to hide them. “I won't.”  
  
The old man did not have a voice for sighing, which has honestly been bothering the Hell out of Akechi for years now, and yet it haunted his dreams still and still and still. The old man sighed. “It does not have to end this way.”  
  
“Everybody dies.”  
  
“As you have time and again.”  
  
It shot through him cold, from the blue, every time. Infinite multiplicity of possibilities and yet he has to sit through this again, if the old man would just get on with it.

“Thou hast fallen, and lost thine resolve,

unbeknownst to thee true retribution…”

***

[NOVEMBER 20TH]

The power of the wildcard meant it was time again to not make the same damn mistakes. He woke up this morning, precious little time lost, aside from the punchline. Easily recouped, even if Joker still didn't find the bullet funny. Tsk, tsk.  
  
“I usually don't get to see this part twice in a row, you know?”  
  
Joker didn't have anything to say about that, as Akechi took a seat on the floor next to him. Niijima had been taken care of, distracted with some pithy macguffin, but whether that would stop the pounding of feet down the hallway…  
  
“SHIT!” It ended up being Sakamoto bursting through the door this time, perhaps both times, who cares and who remembers. “FUCK!”  
  
What a headline this would be, the famed leader of the Phantom Thieves making an unbearable mistake, catching a co-conspirator's face with the pistol of his discontent, and unable to bear it all... Of course, Akechi would have to field the questions.   
  
_ How  _ did _ a sixteen year old get down here by himself?  
  
_ No Comment is crow for new day's consumption— Probably what he would have to say, anyway, smiling a little, hands politely in his lap. Sakamoto crumpled to his knees, suddenly very quiet, which saved Akechi the burden of standing for the next act. Their eyes didn't quite meet, which was no fault of Akechi's, and all the fault of his real-life-gun already poised.  
  
“You.”  
  
It reached him in just the right way to make Akechi tilt his head. Smile a little. “Yeah.”  
  
Hatred will always be novel, splattered on the wall— Akechi even remembered Joker was left-handed this time. In the previous,  _ was. _ Joker  _ is _ , of course, dead, and cooling faster than the other corpses in the room neatly shut. All's well that ends well.  
  
Down the hall, Akechi busied himself with his messages until the elevator opened in an unfortunate whirl of blades.

***

Addressing the old man first was against Akechi's aesthetic but,  _ God. _ “I didn't think Okumura had it in her.”  
  
“The sea of souls is vast. Infinite. Very, very deep.” If he was bland today, perhaps it was the tradition of it all, the rope wrapped around his neck. “You look,” A distasteful pause, cough, “Teeerible.”  
  
“Thank you.”   
  
Okumura certainly had done a number on him, watering the patchy yard grass where it hadn't been stomped out. She'd even bothered to salt the wounds, throwing her tears around, but Akechi wasn't foolish enough to think they were for him at all. Perhaps murder is a more common solution for daddy issues than he thought, although nothing can fix—   
  
“Perhaps...”  
  
Oh boy. Before the old man could finish furrowing his brow Akechi raised the less hacked of his hands to his mouth, in a mockery of concern. “Aren't you tired?”

...

“... Thou has lost thy way,

and—”  
  
  
“Ignoring me, now?"  
  
  
“— Becomest less than a name…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so angry at brittany lesbianakechi for changing their url to lesbianakechi and making me type it every time. god damn it. without you this wouldn't be here. lov u.


	2. RISE DARKLY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Akechi, unfortunately, hits the ground a couple of times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for those at home keeping score, ryuji is winning. this one's a little crunchy but still canon typical.

[NOVEMBER 20TH]

It had cost him the month, this time, but starting from the first of November gave him nothing but time to erase his tracks. Maybe before he'd been suspicious. Careless. Not this time, busy Sundays instead dedicated to having Company Lunches sandwiched between Makoto and Takamaki, laughing. Everybody laughed, had a grand old month, and what a month it was.

_“You okay?”_

Makoto had asked him two nights ago, something not so soft as concern in her. They'd been going home, on the empty last train, rattling like the chains around Joker's jerking wrists. Bang.

_“Yes, why?”_

Maybe he'd been falling asleep, or something, slumped forward in the seat. Falling. No, probably not. She'd leaned toward him from where she was standing— standing, on the train, on purpose, imagine— to stare him in the face.

_“You're not usually very nice, you know…”_

… No Phantom Thieves in the hallway this time, the elevator going up was similarly empty… 

_“... I just want to make sure you're not dying, or something.”_

_“Dying?”_

_The wind whistled outside the train, directly in his ears._

It had surprised him, the same way the phone buzzing in his pocket often surprised him. An unknown, unlisted, unknowable number. “Shido.”

“Try again, you half-bit half-wit.”

"Makoto." She was anxious, coping in the little sing-song rhymes. "Wordplay doesn't suit you.”

“Choke!”

“Unlikely.” Akechi smiled, leaned hard against the elevator's back wall. Her voice was brittle, the way it gets when she cries, so he must have fucked this up again somewhere— they already know Joker is dead, within the half hour, less. "Do you have a point?"

"Fuck you!"

The numbers on the small elevator screen ticked smaller, approached ground level. He didn't bother with the other gun strapped securely to his side. If _Makoto_ was going to kill him, she'd certainly have done it before today, during their years of bothering the living daylights out of each other. 

Someone was crying on the line, now, and it certainly wasn't him. What was this supposed to be?

“Very eloquent. Good—”

“No.”

It was colder than she'd ever been, panic is a briefly splitting headache. That she still had surprises to spring was a surprise in itself.

The elevator froze. 

_He'd smiled, thin but supposedly real. “I guarantee you, I have no intention of dying.”_

_She held on to him with that look, definable only in negatives. “Good.”_

“No,” she repeated, took another turn to put her voice back into the hardline. The crying continued, not Makoto either, unless he could just hear her screaming pathos. “I want to hear it.”

The elevator dinged, still stuck in between floors. If that was what she was waiting for, there it was resounding, decidedly not his stop... The numbers flickered out, followed quickly by the overhead lights. Akechi was plunged into darkness so, so easily.

_Maybe she didn't hate him._

"... Makoto?"

His voice cracked, and he cursed it. Of course she couldn't kill him herself. Akechi knew Makoto too well for that, and yet she took a last sharp breath on the line. "Goodbye."

Someone else got halfway through a _Bastard!_ , which Akechi has heard enough times to catch even halfway strangled by the disconnected line, or the whipcrack of the released elevator cord. The drop was sudden and certain, the rattle of a subway car straight to Hell.

***

The sky above this yard was nothing to write home about, even if he had a home to write. The sky above the yard was nothing, in the center, as if whoever had painted the still blue edges had trusted him to not look up… Given, it wasn't particularly a choice on Akechi's part, but peeling himself off of his back would have involved seeing wherever that old man had stuck the rope today. 

He stared into the void. Waited. 

Waited some more.

Caved. 

“What," Akechi said, "are you not going to give me the speech?”

“Perhaps.” The gallows creaked, thoughtfully, in the non-wind. “Perhaps not.”

“Will you tell me how in Hell they dropped the elevator?" 

The laugh he got in response was not unlike the old wood. Of course the old man wasn't useful— what was it? _Meddling in mortal affairs_. Fuck it. Akechi didn't wait for his actual smartass answer. "Can I go?"

“Truly? I’m not sure."

Powerless. The old man is powerless, in the way that a door is powerless, unless it is locked. 

***

[NOVEMBER 2ND]

Mementos. Joker was too busy dragging Sakamoto's idiot ass out of a blast radius to notice it coming. Iishiki, no, Sakura, Sakura Futaba, slammed her fingers so hard on the Necronomicon keyboard Akechi felt the desperation behind his eyes. Position Hack wouldn't save them now— too slow— 

He jumped without thinking.

***

"Fascinating."

"Shut your mouth." The worst part was the old man's chuckle, the manic jest of it. Akechi would take a thousand sighs first. It kept on and on and "I said—"

"Oh, I'm aware." The joy drained from his tone. "This is part of the fiction, yes? None of this… 'friendship' business for you?"

Akechi grit his teeth. This bullshit again, social link social link social link. "Let me go."

" _Let_ you?"

"Don't mock me." 

"Oh, you are a mysterious one."

That caught his attention before Akechi could stop it, his fists unwillingly uncurling. "How so?"

"The wildcard is the empty set." The old man raised a hand, fingers splayed out. "Emp-ty."

"Do _not_ mock—"

He was ignored, as the old man crossed one of his longspider legs behind the other.

"I am incapable of telling it with her... whimsy," (and was that a _smile_ ) "But, if she were here, Margaret would wax poetic about the conceptual zero." 

In the split second, Akechi couldn't decide which snide remark to make— was that his girlfriend, daughter, middle fucking name?— but his input wasn't necessary to the cross of the old man's arms, and would as always have no effect on the length of this God damn speech. 

"Get to a point," Akechi said instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i swear to god this fic stops being edgy soon. i promise.


	3. EMPTIED IN THE STREET

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> new entries for akechi's food blog. also, he gets hit by a car.
> 
> tw car crashes, asphyxia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the beginning of the end of the edge. i promise it gets better.

[OCTOBER 4TH]

Akechi had thought that Makoto breaking his nose would be the most embarrassing part of this particular life up until the moment he was hit by a car. Nobody screamed when it didn't stop, nobody screamed for it to stop, nobody screamed and his phone was gone— He realized with all suddenness that this would kill him, too.

He dragged the hand he could still move down his face, until his fingertips ended up crushed between his teeth. What was a little more blood now? The indignity of it— laid out by some kind of beaten-up station wagon, speeding like a bat out of Hell and twice as ugly white— was already far beyond him.

***

"The empty set," (as if there had been no months-long pause in the conversation, as if Akechi hadn't lived through a whole August-September- and change since last he heard,) "is one of infinite potential."

"Yes, I'm fine, thank you."

"Margaret—"

Again. Akechi bothered to quit chewing his fingernails for that one. "Whom?"

"You will never meet."

The edge in the sentence knocked Akechi's ribs back into order. Maybe the old man had another emotion aside from smug selfrighteousness. Maybe it's... sad, somewhere in there, if you’re sentimental.

He smiled the small smile. "... You would have hated one another."

Nevermind. The old man is not allowed to make _jokes_. Akechi shoved his hands into his pockets. "I hate—"

"Yes, yes, everyone and everything." He sounded tired. Akechi also sounded tired. The world, at this rate, was so, so tired. He knew throwing a glare would be inadvisable the moment after he did it and found the beady old eyes staring directly back. "And yet, there are two zeroes together."

Akechi scoffed on the beat. "No doubling nothing."

"… Once they touch, they become wholly and truly infinite. This is Margaret's hypothesis."

Crow and Joker, sitting in a metaphor. 

***

Joker continued rearranging the shelves in mostly silence, which was fine— Leblanc was often the carefully cultivated kind of empty, which allowed Joker's cat to snuggle up on Akechi's lap despite the July heat. Mona was the name that Akechi was careful to never call him, because acknowledging his true sentience might make petting him weird.

"He likes you."

Joker's voice never fails to startle him. Over time Akechi had gotten better at steadying his hands about it. "You think?"

Mona purred. As good an answer as any. Joker scooped up Akechi's empty cup in a deft motion, using the pass to poke his cat very gently on the nose.

"Yeah, look. You've left him speechless."

To a normal person, Joker's little cat did something immensely cute when he turned his head and meowed just a little. Akechi, however, had prime ability to hear the _Shuuuuuutuuuup_.

"He's a chatty thing, isn't he?" 

" _Oh_ ,” Joker looked him dead in the face over the rims of his glasses, “you have _no_ idea."

Akechi smiled how someone might expect him to at a joke, watched Joker out of the corner of his eye as he returned to moving things. It wasn't random, definitely, but the pattern certainly did not lend itself to anyone figuring out what exactly he was— 

"I'm looking for something," he said suddenly, without turning around again.

"Obviously."

Of course. Yeah. The cat— really very small, not exactly a kitten but far from full-sized— flipped around to open one eye exactly halfway, lazily in Joker's direction. “He’ll kill you."

Akechi did not freeze.

Very pointedly, both of the human people in this room did not hear this. Instead, Joker lit up spotting something, a little to the left on the higher shelf. “Hell yeah.”

“He’ll _kill_ you...!” cried the cat, with languid purpose. Akechi did not freeze.

It was too late, Joker was already standing on the counter to get at what frankly looked like just another container of beans. “All-right.”

It comes out of his mouth like two words, like all-ways, all-right. Beaming idiot.

Mona lifted his head at last. “If you use the new stuff, Boss WILL kill you.”

Joker winked. At the cat. Of course.

Akechi looked down to the genuine annoyance on Mona’s face. It would be way early, but if Sakura Sojiro does the job for him in the middle of summer, isn’t that just as well? There are many ways to skin a... metaphor. Joker dies, Joker dies, or Joker dies.

All's well. Akechi whistled gently between his teeth, the way people do at regular cats, just to watch his little kitty features scrunch in offense. It might have made him smile. Mona might have smiled when Akechi scritched him under the chin. It was all the platonic ideal of a cafe, if Joker hadn't decided to lean in verytooclose right then.“Since when are you the cat whisperer?”

The hand-sized coffee grinder crunched away steadily. Get a _grip._

Mona stretched flat out across Akechi's lap, suddenly very liquid. Since when, indeed, but the light, teasing question begged an answer. “I’m a dog person, actually?” 

Joker laughed, and only by the grace of God did Akechi not catch his knee on the front of the bar and scare the Hell out of everyone. Holy shit, since _when_ , and now the idiot was smirking away at him. Akechi couldn't let the silence settle like this.

“Am I a joke to you?” 

That sent Joker laughing _again,_ God. Now what. Wasn’t this someone else’s bag, losing their mind over pointless banter? This was far to go for a ruse, does he actually think Akechi is funny— all the worse, if he's actually enjoying it. Fuck. Akechi flipped through several phrases that would settle out the mood.

“I’ll kill you?”

It came out a question, which was fair, since he’s been trying for a while now, but also, God damn it. Akechi could feel the cat looking at him. But it's just a cat. Cats do that.

"Ugh, then get on with it," said the regular cat.

Joker got a kick out of that one too, kept on cackling until he was done. He eventually managed to set out two sets of pour-over stuff, instead of just making one pot. Despite this, that stupid smile hadn't left his face. “You can't kill me.” (Morgana shifted under Akechi’s still hand.) “I make the coffee, after-all.”

And he does. The question of whether Akechi wants it or not is not actually a question, however— “I did not consent to pay for this.”

“Call it…” Joker fell briefly silent, measuring out the grounds, “...Compensation for emotional labor...?”

That got a bark of laughter out of _Akechi_ — a dog person through and through. Fuck. He resisted the urge to cover his mouth, but nothing had gone unseen, unheard, or unexperienced. Joker pointed the spout of the kettle at him.

“See? You’ve had that in you all along. Loosen up, Goro.”

Had Akechi been drinking coffee, he would have died aspirating it. Joker (leaning onehanded on the bar with his eyebrows up high, God damn him) was clearly aware of this, waiting patiently for his sputtering recovery. It took longer than it should have, or, long enough that Joker actually went back to doing his job.

Still, Akechi recovered eventually.

“Did I give you permission to call me by my given name?”

“Did you ever _not_ give me permission?” He paused his pouring, waiting for the coffee to bloom, “It’s okay, I know you prefer, uh, what is it?”

Oh, no, here it comes. More 'dunking on' the Detective Prince persona, in itself wholesale grifted from Inaba in the middle of the Nobody Cares prefecture. Would he give Shirogane Naoto so much grief, Akechi had to wonder, because Joker _loved_ to mock him for being inauthentic, _the second_ , and, apparently, ‘on Zenigata-nii’s shitlist’, whatever _that_ was supposed to mean. 

Mona turned his head to watch. Akechi wished he didn't know why, but alas. Joker was making that face again, the one he uses to lie, cheat, and steal shards of soul to strike unflinching into himself.

… This would probably hurt Akechi’s feelings. 

“That’s right.” Joker snapped his fingers as if he’d actually forgotten, or Akechi couldn’t see the gleam in his eye. He started the pour again. “‘Emotional distance’.”

Emotiona— Oh, _fuck_ , Joker would be splattered onto the shelves if Akechi had a gun right now. “Ha... You read about me? I’m... flattered, honestly.”

“Sometimes." Another pause, Akechi drinks enough coffee here to know it’s the last one. "You know I buy magazines for the personality quizzes.”

“Have they told you that you’re a tool, lately?”

“Nope. I'm the most desirable man alive five _Enigmatic Love_ s running. Why?”

Mona tittered before reminding Akechi that he speaks person. “Liar.”

That one was almost a meow. He must be getting better at tuning the words out. However… "Oh, I'm not accusing you of falsely claiming a title," (The corner of Joker's mouth twitched, definitely got him,) "but I do want to know why you're buying _Enigmatic Love,_ specifically."

"Why…?"

All the girls who want boyfriends run on _Enigmatic Love_ like serialized clockwork… Or, so Akechi's been told. Blood whistled in Akechi's ears. "Just want to know what you think."

The coffee was ready. Joker, however, did not serve it, instead… stopping. He curled his hands once, twice, made… a decision? He strode into Leblanc's tiny kitchen, away from Akechi himself. 

"What I think?" Joker asked, in the voice of someone who hadn’t missed three beats.

"Yes."

"Well," (Akechi could still hear the smug in him clearly, which either meant it carried or he turned it up to compensate,) "I'm a complex individual. You're going to need to be more specific."

"No."

"Hm. Then I think it's time for lunch?" He was only gone for a handful of moments, so his return with two plates surprised Akechi. Joker hesitated, in that near-imperceptible-tilt-of-his-head way. "Unless, you don't want to?"

It wasn't the top of Akechi’s priority list, certainly, but the plate was already served. It would be a waste to say no, and besides, he was curious.

"Is it… good?"

"Sojiro's curry? The _best._ " Joker set the plates down, pulled up the seat next to him, leaned back over the counter to grab the cups he'd left on the other end. “You mean you don’t know?”

“I’ve never had the opportunity to try…?”

"And you come here HOW often?"

For a _honey, I’m home?_ All the damn time. "Yes, yes. Thank you for the food."

He was right, it was good, if maybe spicy for Akechi's taste. Joker started in without inhibition, along with some kind of asinine conversation topic Akechi couldn't hear, because he was coughing.

Coughing an awful lot. Joker might have stopped talking, because Akechi was coughing. He couldn't hear anyway. Coughing. It might not be coughing.

It took Akechi a minute to stand, Mona tipping forward off his lap, and less than that to fall.

***

The air in the yard felt thin but was always some semblance of breathable. The old man politely waited for Akechi to quit gasping and stitch together the remnants of his dignity. Settling back into the custom of quiet animosity was more difficult than it should have been. Never before has he suffocated, and what the _Hell._

"So many beginnings with no end in sight, hm?"

His pity time was up. Akechi scoffed, thinly too. "Did you NOT just see me die again."

"... Not exactly, no. But even so, you have curiously risen again." 

Tilting his head made the rest of the old man swing, back and forth. The urge to be contrarian ( _is_ it mysterious if this happens every single time, time, and time) stuck in Akechi's throat like...

… No. It didn't. Not everything is like something else. He swallowed. "What happened to me?"

"That's for you to—"

The laugh escaped before Akechi could catch it, grating against its witnesses. If it was for him to _determine_ , _figure out_ , God forbid _learn_ some kind of _lesson_ from, then what happened became crystal clear in less than an instant.

"Oh? Is something funny?"

"Not particularly,” Akechi wiped at his mouth with the heel of his hand, not that it would help _now,_ “I just didn't expect him to tire of me so quickly!"

_Poisoned_ in Leblanc! A great blog post for the next time he's able to make one, no matter what he had to pay for it, and good for Joker for having it in him!

The old man would frown at him for that one, but Akechi was prepared for it. The old man should have frowned at him for that one, but instead the far space over Akechi’s head yawned, and the old man stared. "The other with the power of the wild card…"

Akechi quietly resolved to strangle the old man barehanded if this turned into a speech about ‘potential’, but those were always delivered with solid, piercing eye contact. God knows what’s behind him here. Akechi refused to turn. Whatever it was, the old man watched.

"... Do you believe he is like you?"

***

Akechi had never been possessed to visit the new hipster crepe place, so finding himself in the line for its opening day in the middle of his latest September was novel. Next to him, Takamaki shifted from foot to foot as she tried to see over the heads of people around them.

"Excited?"

" _Hyped_." She bounced, once or twice. "Thanks for coming with me."

Akechi blinked, which he hid under a blank smile. He'd been surprised, certainly, when she'd called him up and asked, but a prince of any kind would not turn down a lady, and he is in fact the _king_ of vapid.

"Of course. I love the scene."

"I still appreciate it." She extended her arm, a loosely closed fist gently shoving him in the shoulder. "I was afraid you'd tell me it violates your contract or something."

"It's no trouble." he said, despite the fact that a _real date_ certainly would have come back to kick him in the ass... Unless Shido would have thought it convenient for him to date a model, or a Phantom Thief, or a model Phantom Thief, this would end very distinctly in a murder. Thankfully, there are several reasons this is not a date at all, real or otherwise. "Though I am surprised that Suzui isn't here…?"

Her grandfather died recently, he remembered from a time or so ago, she's visiting grandma in God knows where— Unless that was next month. The conversation lapsed for a moment, probably due to his insensitivity. Takamaki shifted her weight to the left. Cagey in an instant.

"She's on vacation with her mom."

Perhaps Suzui's trip to the sticks was later— There is _also_ the family's ugly divorce on the table. Maybe it's been the same trip all along.

"Ah, yes, I remember. How is she doing?"

"Very well, thank you!"

The tension drained instantly. She dazzled him with a smile, and not for the first time Akechi wondered if he could learn something from her. His own self-deprecating grins never caught on to anyone but talk show hosts, where Takamaki smiles were naturally contagious— Akechi found his lips genuinely quirking and was, frankly, disgusted. Amazing. "And how did you convince your agency to let you date, then?"

She's a model, not an idol, so the answer was moot anyway. It was small talk, a little bit of a subject backtrack to show he'd been paying attention because people _love_ that, but Akechi knew the second it left his mouth that it was the wrong thing to say. Takamaki guffawed, full on. He steeled himself against the disparaging comment sure to come— again, as if they could or _would_ go out, but her eyes were shrewd now. Something, certainly, was coming.

"Why, do you have your eye on somebody?"

Shit. No. Hell.

"I'm gay."

Wait, fuck, worse— now she's actually watching him instead of their crawl to the doors. A rat in his own idiot trap. Her lips pursed gently, God save him, she's _sympathetic—_

“Would you like the number to Mishima’s ‘Hopelessly In Love With Joker’ support group?”

Or not! It was not sympathy! Goodbye!

She caught his elbow when he turned to leave (“Come on, don’t be a bad sport, I’m kidding,” even though she absolutely wasn’t) and, somewhat more unwillingly, he returned to their spot in line. Two steps forward, then two more. The silence did not have to grow awkward, it was born that way.

"That was mean. I'm sorry." She rocked back and forth on her feet, heel to toe and back again. Even her apologies are authentic-sounding. 

"Don't worry too much about it."

… A support group, hm…? Running the gamut meant he's seen Joker's love life fail time and again— The one or two ugly goes where Joker had managed to dump Takamaki before he'd _been_ amicably dumped for her actual girlfriend were the most terrifying of all… If your name was Sakamoto and you were caught in the middle, anyway. For Akechi, any grudgematch was fun to watch.

"You sure?" she asked, genuine again.

About as sure as he was pissed when Sakamoto got his foot in the door two or three times ago. The sting still hadn't healed off that one— SAKAMOTO— since the only thing more amazing than it starting at all was Joker (Joker!) managing to fuck it up.

"Yup."

He shrugged, rolling his shoulder against the ache where he got cleaved exactly once. Okumura now demanded a thought he didn't want to spare. It’s September, so she’s still engaged. For all the favors Akechi’s ever done Okumura Haru and the world by turning the big bang on the good C.E.O, over and over again, why don’t the famed Phantom Thieves of Hearts ever do anything about _that_ son of a bitch? Then again, if Okumura wanted to break the spiral of depressive bullfuck early, she could just stab him herself and be done with it. 

Seventeen is late for a first murder, but maybe any princess would hesitate to get their hands dirty.

(“So,” Takamaki said, the easiest ignored conversation starter in existence. Akechi let it pass without listening to the rest.)

… Though, Okumura Haru _had_ gotten close to decapitating Joker, come to think of it. Seventeen is especially late to be a coward about your first murder, but the persistent crick in Akechi's own neck certainly didn't speak to Joker's guaranteed safety in middle November past. She was Joker's shortest turnaround to date, which was indeed saying something in a game where Niijima Makoto was playing.

("Hey, c'mon." 

Nope. Not that one either.)

At least when it was Makoto, Akechi had an actual excuse to break into Sae's liquor, and it was Makoto more often than it wasn't. Once a loop, minimum— both the drinks and the stories were getting repetitive. She deserved it, every time. Being soft about her dead dad was one massive shortcoming, but telling Joker himself that she wants to be a cop? An absolute datekiller.

And if Akechi knew it, well.

“Uh… Did you like the new episode?”

“What?” If she keeps catching him off guard he might die of a heart attack. “Sorry?”

“Featherman? Did you like it?”

Takamaki reached forward, tugged on the end of his tie, which was FAR too close for him to think through anything at all, actually. If anybody else had entered so far into his personal space, either he or they would be bleeding on the sidewalk— however, he resisted a stabbing instinct and Takamaki continued to be bad at strangling him, so they continued standing just like that.

She had to turn the bottom of his tie up at him before was able to understand. Owl's insignia winked back at him in the afternoon sun.

"Oh." Commemorating the new season's premier with his tie pin was habit at this point, but this was the first time anybody had called him on it— what was he usually doing in September? Working? God help him and Niijima Sae's cultural illiteracy, what the Hell, uh. “What’s Featherman?” No, wait, that’s not vapid, it’s quite literally too stupid to function, go back. “Ah, is that what that is? It was a… gift.”

“Mm.” Takamaki let him go to catch up to the people in front of them. His opinions on the characterization of Featherman Yellow could and should wait. “From who?”

“My… cousins.”

No, fuck, Akechi forgot he's supposed to be a strongly implied orphan. That won't fly, unless Takamaki also forgot, so he did his best to not sweat. She wasn’t looking directly at him. Her tilted gaze just over his shoulder made it worse, somehow.

“Aren’t you an orphan?”

Damn it, leave it to her to remember the stupid details. “You should be ashamed of reminding me.”

“And you have cousins.”

She was a fair amount shorter than him even when she rocked up on her toes, but he’s never felt more threatened by a leading question in his life. Takamaki was typecasting, and shame on her. People have dead parents and snotnosed cousins all the time, it’s not like orphaning is a holistic thing. 

“Yes? I do? Of course?”

“Cousins,” she meaningfully broke it where he definitely _didn’t_ interrupt her, cousins was definitely the end of her last sentence and yet Akechi _still_ nearly felt bad, “who would buy you one of the less popular of the incredibly niche American-released five-hundred-American-dollar Featherman tie pin set with the 24-karat diamond insets, when you don’t know what Featherman is.”

“... Exactly.” Her knowledge of the thing might have been impressive, if only she hadn't told him how much he'd overpaid for it. “That’s exactly it.”

She wasn't quick on the riposte, he could see her thinking about it. People like to pretend that Takamaki is an open book, which, massive mistake for morons, but closed? Far from it. The raise of her eyebrows, for example, warned Akechi of an oncoming strike.

“Do you wanna keep this lie up or are we going to complain about F-Yellow.”

“PLEASE don’t call her that, you sound like some kind of idiot.” Wait. "Ah—"

“A-ha!” Seeing Takamaki’s face light up filled him with an emotion. If they were real friends, it might have been joy or something, but they weren’t and he just lost the battle and the war. “Friends and countrymen, we’ve spotted the nerd.”

And that was an insult he couldn’t forgive.

“I apologize that my taste in television offends you somehow.”

Bowing would be overplaying, but his desire to jump topics was very nearly that strong.

"Me? No." Takamaki waved her hand, before showing the back to him. "Check it out."

_Talk to the hand_ was classless and Akechi nearly told her so before he caught her actual meaning, at the tips of her fingers. She certainly did have a novelty manicure and he certainly _wasn't_ —

"Jealous?"

Damn.

"It's ugly."

"Aw, come on. Don't be like that." She dropped her hand, which gave him a grand view of the smile playing across her face again, "You should find some chill before I report you to Futaba for being uncool.”

“Featherman _IS_ cool.”

There is always a knife in his pocket and it flashed across his mind again. Imagine being that guy, to stab someone over a kid's show. Imagine being the guy who doesn't have the stabbing instinct.

"Yeah, totally!" Takamaki wasn't lying to him, or she was good at it, “That's not what I meant. If you're mean to me I'll tell her that you think Pink's arc was awful and she'll ban you from the forum for life."

"Excuse you, that isn't even funny. The Victory arc is one of the most artfully construc—” The threat registered on a massive delay, followed swiftly by the improbability of it all. “Wait. Sakura has mod privileges on… which forum, exactly?"

“Her reach is massive and I never said that she's a mod.”

“Wh— how _else_ would she—”

“Don’t worry about it!" 

Takamaki let it sit. If she meant to bother him, it was working, and Akechi racked his brain in the meantime for things he knew about Sakura Futaba. It frankly wasn’t much. She’d distrust him immensely until she witnessed him cheating the hell out of his boss… The rumors about him that spread on her little ‘Phan-site’ probably don’t help his case. If she was going to hate him, she might as well hate him for something he’s actually done, like killing her mother.

Wakaba. Not a can of worms for now.

The last thing he knew about Sakura Futaba was that the worst of Joker’s breakups to meaningless date was _Inari_ dumping Joker on his ass for her. The fallout was legendary and the fact that all the art was lost to the car accident of all things was insulting in itself— 

"Hello? Earth to... Akechi?"

"Hunh?"

"Lost you there for a second."

Akechi took the step and a half he'd missed. They were crawling, ever closer to actually being able to order eventually. "It happens, I suppose. Sorry, Takamaki."

She hummed. Just like that, the silence between them became… comfortable enough, he supposed, if only she could let that be.

"Call me Ann."

"What." Akechi didn't feel himself jump as much as suddenly see his hands, curled and unsure, hovering at the bottom of his vision. Put those down. "Sorry?"

"I mean, it isn't a big deal, and I guess you don't have to, but." The door opened to admit them, they were closing in to the end of this encounter in a hum of customers. "I like my friends to call me Ann."

The one room of the restaurant was not very large to start with— the hype was wider spread than Akechi had assumed, people solid from door to counter— and it was becoming smaller by the second. There were too many people, eating, waiting to eat, or whatever else one does in a novelty restaurant, God knows and who cares.

"Your friends?"

Takamaki squinted between a couple of heads. "Yeah? My friends."

Akechi's head suddenly became very very loud, the old man was laughing at him on the whistling wind. No. No no no.

"Everybody calls me Akechi."

Including his father and excluding many, many people who were dead or will be. The self-deprecation crept back onto his face in real time, this is meant to be soft, perhaps a little bit lonely looking, but decidedly distant, try again next time.

"Well, I'm certainly not calling you Detective Prince." She smiled at him, again, for the nth time today. It was a joke. A joke and a failure to pick up the hint. "So, who's your favorite Featherman?"

"Yellow Owl."

Instinct activated before he could tell her to continue calling him Akechi. Damn it.

"Oooh, no hesitation, hm?"

"Nope." The indisputable nostalgic attachment— his mother's favorite, and damn the new reboot for ripping one of her fundamental arcs apart— was knowledge reserved for friends, of which Akechi has none. He was, however, bound by conversational obligation. "Yours?"

"Pink. She's a lesbian."

The walls took a stabilizing breath.

"Her _actress_ is a lesbian, there's a difference."

… A difference of about 20 episodes worth of filler and counting, the pacing of the show was struck dead by the Takeba-Kirijo wedding and frankly it (not to mention the media dancing around the criticism or risking the wrath of Kirijo Mitsuru herself) was becoming tired.

"Hm. Is there." 

Takamaki’s voice went flat. She turned to him and Akechi's danger instinct pinged again— that wasn't exactly what he’d meant to say, whoops.

"When she goes on a two-year-plus honeymoon, I…" He tilted his head in a way that was intended as apologetic, "... suppose not?"

Her stance relaxed, and it took Akechi half a moment to register that she’d been winding up to… what, punch him? That kind of showtime would have gotten them escorted out of the restaurant fruitless, not to mention saddled him— God forbid— with the lasting consequences of Takamaki thinking he’s a straight man on the internet.

Wait. No, the memory that she _knows_ he isn't a _straight_ man on the internet came back to bite him fast. Damn it all. 

Takamaki swiveled back away from him slowly, the panic sirens fading, her focus recaptured by— "What do you think?"

"I'm a complex indiv—"

"No." she pointed. The wall was covered with numbers, small pictures of what were presumably crepes, and even smaller text descriptions. God save them. "Can you see like, any of that?"

Akechi squinted too, as if it would make a difference, but unfortunately there was no besting a bad graphic designer. They took steps forward, next to being next.

"Are you the Catholic one?" Technically speaking, he's the Catholic one, but the question stood— someone in this club was raised steeped in guilt, but who was it again? Maybe her. She blinked, finally perhaps caught off guard. Shook one of her manicured hands from side to side. Good enough for Akechi, who matched it with a shrug. "Then, I guess we just pick and pray."

Takamaki closed her eyes for a long moment, hands together. "Twenty five. Your turn."

"Hm. Maybe… Seven."

"Did you even pray?"

He hadn't, but she was joking again, and it was too late anyway. Their orders ("To-go!" Takamaki appended to both,) were placed easily in the hands of a ragged-looking woman who smiled bright at him specifically and refused his money. They moved off to the side so the gaggle of teenagers behind could get theirs in, Takamaki perched easily on a just-then-vacated-stool-type chair and Akechi leaning against the counter next to her.

"Aw, well," she said, as if there was no pause in their conversation, "I guess you didn't need to after all, mister D—"

"If you don't kill that sentence now I'll do it for you."

"Oh, now that's spicy for a man who just received a free crepe."

For a second he was afraid he'd offended her somehow, which was novel in itself— stupid, trivial fear directly the fault of terrible cashier wome—

"Relax, Akechi." Takamaki kicked her legs back and forth, knocking her heels against the legs of the chair. Maybe she'd caught his drift after all, with the name thing, and maybe being an idol and a supermodel did have its perks, but, "Are you gonna put this on your blog?"

"Hm?"

"Your food thing. You still do that, don't you?"

Gourmetprince hadn't posted in… this time around? A couple of months, probably. There's only so many times he can politely comment on August's mediocre French restaurant opening before the awfulness of it actually _gets_ to him. 

"Sometimes, I haven't gotten out much lately. Do you actually follow that old thing?"

Both her heels made a tapping noise as Takamaki sat up as straight as possible. She reminded Akechi of a snake, sitting up like that to strike him. The urge to cut and run was only defeated by the fact that they were waiting for crepes, and he wouldn't have been able to push his way through the crowd at the doors anyway. "I meant to mention this to you before, but… don't freak out, okay? But almond rashes aren't a thing."

" _Excuse me?_ "

There were _no_ posts of the kind on his blog unless— 

Takamaki blinked. "Your blog is sue-shi, right?"

Absolutely, on his days off and when he's possessed to consume outside of his polite persona— Christ— the knife in his pocket— 

"Wait, wait, I think it's cute!" She threw a peace sign at him along with a wink, "Even justice needs to eat!"

The DESCRIPTION, he might just FUCKING die. "Shut up shut up now."

"Wait, it's kind of—"

They're interrupted by the arrival of their crepes, hand-carried to them with a smile, and they both were suddenly possessed by the instinct to _drop it, it's fine, be polite_. Akechi passed twenty-five, some kind of whipped cream monstrosity sticky to even look at, over into Takamaki's waiting hands without a second thought. 

"Nice!"

His own was less ostentatious, certainly some kind of chocolate thing. The woman scuttled back behind the counter, to the somewhat annoyed people at the front of the line and the substantially more annoyed people that have been waiting longer for theirs.

He was surprised, again, by how close Takamaki was able to get in a second, suddenly on her feet and leaning. "What did you get?"

"Not sure…? I suppose we'll find out." 

"True enough."

She started twisting an effortless path towards the door, beckoning him out. That was clever of her, since the restaurant was still somehow full, and the light outside would be nice for the pictures— if she knows anyway, there was no point in being subtle about it. They got a fair ways away from the restaurant before they found a suitable bench.

"If you want a picture of this one," Takamaki held her crepe at about selfie distance, arm's length, "Take it now, because I've been holding back this entire time."

"Thanks."

Akechi kindly snapped one, even though it looked only like a symbol of decadence… Not that his own was much better. Such is the nature of crepes, one must suppose. Inferior dessert food relies on flash, being too sweet to eat quickly, though Takamaki-now-uninhibited certainly was able to pack away a considerable amount of topping at once.

"Oh!" She nearly startled him, but Akechi managed to look towards Takamaki's beaming face calmly. "It's strawberry!"

"Really?" In response, she tilted so he could see. It glistened almost like a wound. "Is it strawberry syrup or… strawberries in syrup."

That's a question that makes precious little sense, but before he could open his mouth to clarify, Takamaki lightly lifted the fork back to her mouth.

"It's fresh. I'm… pretty sure. I think this is house cream, also?"

The still-tilted crepe was proffered further towards him, and the temptation was too great to resist. Akechi dipped his fork into it and Takamaki was right on both counts. This was perhaps artisanal after all. "Oh. That's good. Are you a fan?"

"I loooove sweets," she said, folding the remaining whip into the fruit, "It's surprising you do, though."

"Is it?"

"I dunno, we never talk about it. I feel like we could."

In order to avoid responding, Akechi decided to take a bite of his own dessert. It was, indeed, incredibly chocolate, nearly overwhelmingly so, but there was a taste in it unfamiliar to him. He tried it again, in another go or so but… no, it escaped him. How rare, to find something new, it put an itch in him.

"What is this?"

He didn't have to invite her twice. Takamaki shared with him gladly. "Oh, I like it. Which?"

"This?"

That was frustrating, to the point of panic. He gestured with his fork to one of the many substances mixed into it all. Takamaki tried again, with the light touch she'd given the syrup. "Nutella? Have you never—"

And what the fuck is that, again? 

He couldn't place it and it caught in him. Akechi's chest tightened. Takamaki noticed.

"Are you— oh, _shit_ —" 

Her crepe hit the ground where she tossed— threw— she pulled out her phone to call somebody but nothing feels quite like suffocating, and he would know.

***

"Back so soon?"

It had been months, that was an especially long run at it, too. Akechi coughed more out of rudeness than a desire to clear the throat. "I'm allergic to hazelnuts."

Ann screamed it at the operator instantly, because she'd figured it out. Maybe he'd really died of embarrassment— Of course it was an allergy. Obviously. What had she said, before she'd been freaking out into the phone, _almond rashes aren't a thing._ God damn it.

“Did you do your homework?”

_Do you believe the other is like you_ , haunting the night and his coffee breaks endlessly _._ At least he hadn't been poisoned, unless Sakura Sojiro made recipes specifically to spite him.

“Shut up.”

"Will you avoid your past mistakes?"

"Thrice would be excessive."

“Mhmm.”

There was the vacant whistle in the conversation that lets Akechi know that he’s disappointed the old man again. Good. Akechi wished he could turn to leave, like he would at work— spin around to show his boss his back, perhaps a smile over the shoulder, and begone to the next shitfest on the endless cycling calendar. He can’t turn around in the yard. The old man caught his eye.

“Will you avoid your past mistakes?”

“You already asked me that.”

The old man simply stared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next chapter is worse but i swear to god it gets better


	4. CHILD WASHES BLUE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Akechi gets kidnapped and otherwise inconvenienced by the fact that he watched Death Note.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know the literal premise of this fic is "akechi dies in stupid ways" but, big tw for suicide in this one. i went ahead and bumped the rating to be safe about it-- if anyone thinks i should add the violence archive warning, please let me know. 
> 
> anyway. this is a chapter and a half because i am a MASTER of planning who can't count, and i didn't wanna have it be a downer for an entire week. whoops.

At the very last second, when the hammer struck the bullet, Joker winked. He'd died in the next instant, the ghost of even his smile gone, but Akechi understood all the same— promise, covenant, threat.

_This'll be good_.

Akechi saw, suddenly, November twenty-first laid out in stone: him, in ropes or chains or plastic-twist-ties, waiting for the thieves to stop arguing about _killing the traitor_ and instead explain why they knew or why he's alive or why God is cruel and Joker winked. Someone would pity him for that one, probably. Make him an awful cup of coffee with _a little love_ in it. 

No. No, no no. Stop.

Joker's body was on the table. Not close enough for Akechi to touch it. He tried to make his hands stop shaking enough to finish the ruse, put the gun in the dead Joker's hand, beg the alive one tomorrow to tell him what was so funny… and then, of course, end it.

But, Joker wouldn't do that to a friend. He'd cook a nice meal, with _a little love_ in it. Akechi would choke on it out of spite, in the spirit of fairness, as a way to escape a pointless thought exercise. It always ends. 

He'd already lost. Joker was dead. The gun hit the ground, and both of his hands found his pockets instead. The only question left was die today, or die kidnapped tomorrow. Of course, tomorrow could be different, the key to everything, the one that solves all his problems and fixes his hand tremors for good. Unlikely, though. Cowards don't get good endings.

He popped the hazelnuts into his mouth and tried not to count. The ones that fell from his fingers skittered across the floor like cockroaches, unlike him, who dropped a lot more like a corpse.

The last thing he saw was not the guard's body or Joker's shoes, but the whole scheme dissolving into the gritty vapor of a joke, a joke, a joke. 

***

"Are you so afraid of things you've never had?"

Cognitive selves smell sharp, like ozone or blood. They'd expected him not to notice, or gotten lucky that Akechi can't tell the difference anymore. It isn’t like Akechi often murders people where they bleed. Igor caught Akechi's attention by snapping his fingers, which also did not happen often.

"Oh? Sorry? What do you mean."

“You understand the words as they come.”

Akechi couldn’t argue. Meaning, in fact, was something he could not escape. He watched the old man’s face change somehow, surprise or pity or disappointment.

“Answer the question.”

Misattribution was another thing that defined him. Perhaps he was being looked at knowingly, as if there was something to know. “Are you upset at me?” 

The old man stayed quiet enough that Akechi was forced to guess at the answer.

***

The date is April eighteenth and Joker is Joker now. Finally. He wasn’t very good at suppressing it yet— Akechi could feel Arsene’s lapels under Joker’s own, where Akechi had grabbed him, and they only got more real as the encounter went on. Not literally, of course, since they were in a Shujin High bathroom and not the cognitive world, but apparently being manhandled by a minor celebrity outside the bread stand was enough to set off the danger sensors. Perhaps that was for the better. Akechi _is_ the ultimate threat, but these things need to happen in steps.

He'd plucked a calling card off the wall wordlessly, waved it in Joker's face— not as much an accusation as a silent statement of fact. It didn’t get a rile out of him until Akechi leaned in and muttered to Joker his biggest secret at the time— Personas, and the fact that Joker had made a perfect run, this time around, Kamoshida’s early fall would be nice for the solidifying of his friend group. 

Joker had panicked. All very unlike him, the lapels of the jacket under his uniform bleeding. He was supposed to be showy, not scared, but the bathroom Akechi had been shoved into wasn't a very easy venue. Joker's presence of mind in locking the door behind them was, as always, impressive.

_What's your deal?_

Mostly, that Akechi has gotten very used to his own mortality. But, then again, maybe knowing the exact date you’re supposed to die is worse. Variety is the spice. Akechi probably shouldn’t have led with that one, the 20th, but by the time he thought of it...

_November? Only?_ He'd tried for bravado but Joker's eyes bounced among the filthy mirrors. _B- bullshit._

There must have been something else to substantiate his claims, that wouldn't have made him look like the biggest asshole alive, but Akechi had settled on the one sitting in the bag over Joker’s shoulder. “Also," he'd said, "your cat talks. Hi, Mona.”

_Me-ow?!_

It was the fakest thing he'd ever heard. Joker dropped the bag ( _Ow!_ ) into a regular carry, arm at his side. _No cat in this bag._

"Prove it."

_There's no cat, dammit!_

With that, Joker had turned and left, and Akechi failed. So much for cheating… but there must be a way to do it, break the system so everybody can win. 

Maybe next time. Maybe. Maybe. Next time?

The thought followed him all the way to his complex, up the stairs, and into his apartment, which had been broken into. It’s April, so home visits from the cleaning service are new to him— he’s allowed to be annoyed, pissed even, as he entered his own kitchen.

“Heya, kid, how come you don’t have any groceries?”

Akechi for years has been encouraged to call the man digging in his fridge The Cleaner, a job title and not his name.

“Yagami, why are you in my house?”

Yagami Ren was, of course, not his name anyway, and therefore fair game. Whether he thought Akechi incapable of using Google or flat-out didn’t care about ' _happening_ 'to have the same name as a silver screen actor currently in the big time was a mystery that did not need solving. Akechi passed through to the connected living room without looking at him.

“Well." (Akechi sat down on his expensive couch behind his expensive coffee table and watched from behind the futile search for anything in his expensive fridge,) "Not to eat, I guess.”

Yagami Ren, or whatever his mother called him, hated nothing more than doing his own damn research. Akechi could recite most of the files backwards by now, a living obituary of people who were allowed to be real-person-murdered in the next four and a half months, but that would be weird and he has to fake writing it all down again anyway. Who was first up, Hoshi? 

The fridge door closed, ("This is shameful.") opened again, ("We should eat.") was closed more definitively, Yagami finally turning to address him. “What do you wanna eat?”

That wasn’t what he was supposed to ask— not yet, anyway, it took Yagami an average of months to figure out why and how Akechi was his superior and about a minute on top of that to start _worrying after him_. That's supposed to be an August problem. Akechi cleared his throat, disguised as a chuckle. “Did you come all the way down here for that?”

No way, and Hoshi’s given name was escaping him, to boot. Yagami got far more work than Akechi himself did, after all. Lots of people to kill.

“Aw, all business, _boss_?” He produced a soda from his coat pocket, which unfortunately wasn’t unusual. “No time to chat?”

"Could I stop you?"

The answer was not conventionally, as pseudonyms don't turn up palaces, and not unconventionally, as a rage incident in his apartment was liable to ruin his carpet. Akechi, the mild-mannered Detective Prince, pretended to be powerless.

"Not even if you tried, probably." The soda was raised in a toast to either that or Akechi himself while Yagami took up a crooked perch on the kitchen island, only one leg bent. It looked awfully uncomfortable, but he cracked one of those faces that Akechi pretended not to know meant _settle the fuck in_. "It's my niece's birthday today."

"Mm?" Akechi played stupider than usual, careful blank eyes on the blank surface of his fridge. 

"Yeah. So. We should eat."

This was unusual, but for the life of him Akechi couldn't remember if he usually had food today, specifically. Certainly when he did, Yagami ate it, and didn't insist on… all this. If he was even here at all, on all the other todays. Again, August problems, all the worse for happening early.

"Not to seem rude, but why?"

"I'm not gonna see her today, so," The Cleaner shrugged, "I figure I should do somethin' nice."

"... Where is she?"

Perhaps a foolish question, as there's no way this girl actually exists, but new conversations were becoming difficult to encounter in April. He might as well have then as they come, even when they’re gently covering threats.

"Don't make that face. She lives all on her own, in her high school's dorms." Yagami threw back at least half the soda in one go, "She's a real interestin' one."

"Oh?"

Akechi dug around in his bag for his laptop, in a falsely idle way. There's no weapon in this bag, unfortunately— He'll have to rely on the one between the couch cushions when the niceties run out.

"Yeah. I try to see her once in a while, make sure she's alright, but she had plans tonight."

"Boyfriend?"

Akechi was rewarded with a sharp laugh. There was no way to tell what that meant— possibilities that he didn't particularly care about anyway shuffled through his mind. 

"Nah."

The Cleaner did not continue, just drank his soda. Akechi was halfway to asking for elaboration on that one before he realized that would class him with those God damned talk show hosts, and he’d rather die. Instead, he compensated his silence by purposefully nudging the coasters aside to make space for his computer down on the table. 

He opened it, but there was nothing for him to look up. Shit. "Parents?" Akechi asked, a facsimile of giving a damn.

"Orphan. You know how it is." (Akechi didn't jump when the Yagami’s empty can of Coke made that sharp noise hitting the garbage can.) "So," Yagami said, "where are we eating."

Humility is one of the more difficult faces to affect— slip it on like sheepishness. "I really don't think I should have—" (Yagami's hand went unsubtly into his pocket, Akechi struggled not to notice,) "— someone else's birthday dinner?"

Time was ticking down, down, down, but it was just another soda after all. Where does he keep them. This one was opened slowly, if it could be done. "Don't be like that. She'd want you to have it. She's real good at research."

"... Is she."

"Oh yeah. She loves," He snapped his fingers, once or twice, like someone who actually forgets things— Yagami might pretend to be absent, might even be stupid, but, "What was it. Apathy Syndrome."

That finally got the flinch out of Akechi— _damn it all—_ but the cards were still firmly in his hands, where a very real gun could be in two seconds. The center of the couch was close, just like _orphan who's 'interested' in Apathy Syndrome_ was close, just like the end of this conversation was close. Yagami was closing in on the point, free hand tending back towards his jacket.

"Yeah, she's into weird conspiracy bullcrap, wants to come down once semester ends. She asks for all my newspapers, y'know."

_RAGE INCIDENTS CONTINUE ACROSS TOKYO_ ; _MENTAL SHUTDOWN DROPS STOCKS_ ; _suicide suicide murder suicide_ _murder between the cushions, now—_

Akechi pulled the handgun and fired three empty clicks towards the kitchen. It wasn't _supposed_ to be empty, Yagami was _supposed_ to be down, but instead he was grinning and watching Akechi squirm where he'd dropped to the floor in front of the couch.

Empty. 

"You done?" Yagami asked.

Click. Click. Click. The man in the kitchen is a professional. Of course he searched the place first. Akechi politely waited to be countermurdered, but it did not come. He sat up, slowly, set the useless empty gun back on the couch behind him.

"... So like I was saying, my niece—"

"You can drop that."

"Hunh?"

"You don't have to make up a family member." Since he wasn't bleeding out yet, Akechi figured it would be okay to stand up, return to his seat before. Dignity, God damn it. "Just tell me what you want."

"Wait, wait." Yagami scoffed, as if he was a regular guy and not Shido’s pet hitman. His voice dropped so low Akechi almost couldn't hear him. "I'm not makin' Maiko up. She goes to fuckin' Gekkoukan."

Oh. Well.

Yagami returned to full volume. "You aren't in a position to negotiate here."

With that, Yagami left his half-seat, started a leisurely approach to the living room that Akechi couldn't read in the fucking slightest. Suddenly, strikingly, he's regretted every time he turned Yagami's offers to hang out down.

It was Akechi's turn to speak. This conversation was still new.

"Oh. Sorry? That was… mean. I guess." Akechi cleared his throat. How _does_ Yagami kill people, usually? That would be good information to have, since the only uncertainty left is how much this is going to hurt. "I just presumed one had to eat their family to get into this kind of thing."

… Into the yakuza, into Shido's graces, into the second hitman skin. Akechi didn't get to specify before the Cleaner hit the edge of the carpet and stopped. 

" _’Scuse me?_ " (Akechi blinked at the offense in the tone. Of all the things to set him off, family? He tilted his head, as if he understood or did not understand.) "Did _you_?"

"I, ah." There were no bones in his past that hadn't been long since picked clean— wasn't that the point all along? "I didn't."

"That's good. Me neither. Well. Actually. Full disclosure, did kill my brother." Yagami tilted his drink towards Akechi, in a toast or in defense, "For hitting on a teenager, though! Don't get me wrong."

" _You_ have standards?"

It was out before Akechi could even consider thinking better of it. He was now officially held at gunpoint— Akechi couldn’t even enjoy being right about the gun that was in those ridiculous pockets, because it was being pointed at him. Yagami got frustrated, crossed the threshold into the room. "Yes! Why's that a question!"

Akechi shrugged, made the movement into a thing. He'd intended to throw it around casually, as if he didn't care, but the barrel of the gun was difficult to miss. Dark. Looming. Smaller than it should have been, perhaps.

It winked at him.

"Kid." Yagami said, making a gesture with the hand that wasn't holding the gun pointed straight at him. The soda sloshed, a bit. Would probably stain the carpet. Was he seriously still holding a soda? The gesture was made again.

Phone. Phone was what that meant.

Akechi pulled his cell out automatically, with none of the gravity that a last call should probably have. Who would get that one, Makoto? Christ. He might prefer to die silently, if Yagami would just do it already. 

The gun wavered instead. Another instruction, Akechi realized, as it tilted down towards the coffee table in front of him. _Put it down._

There was the Metaverse, where he would win this fight in a blessed second, but what good would that do anybody now? He might keep winning for a few weeks, a month, and then? It was too big to outrun. The fuckup would catch him eventually.

Same shit as always. 

_Put it down._

Sure, okay. He leaned forward, steady-handed, set it flat on the table— that might as well happen, just like the bullet that decimated his screen in the next second might as well have happened. Another one hit for good measure, burying itself next to its twin in the reinforced surface of the "coffee table". It could have been intimidating, if Akechi was scared of guns, bullets, or the crushing loneliness of having no one to call in the first place. Oh well. He leaned back into the couch.

The gun, meanwhile, took a breather. Yagami squinted at him. "You've been bugged this whole time."

Oh, that would make sense… But, the glass would never come out of those holes. They were pretty big, all things considered, the holes. Were real bullets just… like that?

Respond.

"I probably should have thought of that before you ruined my table."

If this Joker was going to be a coward, bendable, flappable, then _someone_ had to go out in a blaze of bravado. That's how it works. Make a joke. Don't shake. This might be a bluff anyway— getting called was enough to send Akechi packing to the Yard at least once, right? Whatever.

Despite himself, Akechi didn't want to register Yagami getting even closer, so the shards of his cell suddenly became very interesting. Yagami himself stopped again, on the other side of the table. "Look. I got a job, okay? The job is you."

Ah, here is the proverbial bunny, caught finally in the teeth of Akechi's flashing TV smile. This would be one for the old man's books, whatever he'd managed to do to get _a hit taken out on him_. "You're going to rile up the neighbors if you don't get to it soon," the Detective Prince said. A third bullet, ugly response, crashed straight through his laptop screen. It ruined the upholstery too close for comfort but too far for mortal wounding. Akechi crossed one leg over the other to cover his jump. "I really hate to inconvenience them."

"... What the fuck."

"That's the question!" The room was soundproofed, of course, so no one would be summoned by the fourth bullet fired in Akechi's general direction, much less the sad whirring sound his laptop made as it came to its final rest. "Ouch."

"You wanna take this seriously for ten seconds?"

Answer, absolutely not if he could help it. Akechi responded by clasping his hands in his lap and sitting up very straight, star pupil in the class of one. Yagami was out of things to shoot that weren't him. Both of them knew it.

And yet.

"I'm pointing a gun at you!"

If Akechi was having an allergy attack, he'd be dead by now— The only mystery left was why Yagami was stalling, and, again, how much this would hurt when that stopped. "I see that," Akechi said out loud, over the silent goodbye he was bidding to his teeth just in case. "Why?"

And wasn't that the question. The Cleaner got a jump out of him with a sudden move to one side, a sharp sound… The bottom of a half-full can hitting a coaster, and not a bullet in his skull. 

Joker would laugh at that, but Joker’s not here.

He couldn't help it. Akechi hissed. " _Why."_

Yagami's answer was muffled by his newly freed hand passing over his face. "That's where drinks go."

" _You already shot my table!_ "

Off-guard, unguarded, squeaking in genuine offense, this could no longer be called Akechi's finest hour. Was he _really_ that easy to crack?

" _That's_ what gets you?"

" _That's my—_ " Akechi's voice cut out, he cleared his throat again, "That's my line, Ren."

"Oh, we usin' first names now, Go-chan?"

Hearing Yagami call him anything but _boss_ sent a chill up Akechi's spine. The illusion of respect shattered— _Goro_ would have been harsh, but _Go-chan_ curdled blood. "Do not treat me like a child."

"But you are! You're a fuckin' baby!" Yagami waved off Akechi's scoff, continued, "If you just wanted to kill your dad you could have, I 'unno, _asked._ "

Words hit him in the wrong order— _kill, asked, your dad_ — oh, fuck— "How. Do you know that."

"’Cause you're a baby throwin' a fit and that's all you've ever been?" (The empty gun would hurt if Akechi threw it, but he didn't have a free hand to do it with, since both fists were clenched tight in his lap.) "You don’t remember seein’ me on your first day, do you?"

No.

“Yeah, you were busy strutting around like you could burn the place down! You didn’t even have your fake name yet, it was like a fuckin’ ghost was pacing the hallways.”

There was a question there but he couldn’t voice it. Yagami kept on, unopposed.

" _Okita_. Yeah, that's you."

Akechi's jaw was shocklocked shut, or he would have gone for the jugular with his God-damn teeth. Nobody gets to say that name especially not Yagami and his

"I can smell the daddy issues half a mile away and so can he, kid— he knows."

lie lie lie not listening because he lies, get a _grip._

"I only get dirtywork, 'n _he_ only does this," Yagami waved his gun, barrel shaking _no no no,_ "to the replaceables."

_You've been bugged the whole God damn time._

"They want me to finish up here and go get that kid with the glasses on the double."

Akechi choked on the math. 

"So, this is gonna go real bad for you _and_ your little boyfriend unless you listen real close."

The gun looked at him Akechi, who looked at the gun, but it's not like that and one of his hands opened,

"I wanna help you. My people can help you."

Akechi’s hands were covered in blood like they should be— always covered in it from where he hurts people with phase-of-moon half-full holes

“More good news. I fuckin’ hate shooting kids, y’know?"

The useless gun was in his sticky hand before Yagami could stop him because nobody can stop him: not Shido not the old man and not God

"... But I’ll do it if you’re up to some dumb shit. I'm stickin' my neck out for ya, kid, or tryin' to, and I won’t die for nothing. So,” Yagami loomed over the table and cast a shadow over it all “Let's. Go. Eat."

The barrel was an old enemy and Akechi would take a turn pressing it against his own head if it had to happen; Yagami winced like he'd been spiderbitten that bloody handful of minutes ago

"C’mon, Don't be stupid."

Empty guns aren't like models at all but Akechi didn't shake when he stared Yagami in the face full on, and the wind whistled, and the Devil said, "Last chance."

“No cat in this bag,” Akechi’s smile said, and the gun said _click click click,_ and the gun said _Bang!_ and Joker said _There’s no cat, dammit!_ and the old man stayed quiet because it hurt too much.

***

It had all been pointless.

"God must exist because it is my enemy." The dirt was cold against Akechi's face and so he rose. "I'm _finished_ being a _joke_ , a _plaything_ , _alive!_ And yet!" A creak caught his attention and so Akechi rounded with malice. "If this is your idea of fun, then I quit! Find a new bastard!"

The old man's eyes met his. Laughing. The old man was laughing at him, _again_ , curling his fingertips between the noose and his neck. But Akechi was not finished.

"If this is how it's going to be, then let me DIE!"

The yard took a sharp breath, as if it had been struck by something larger than Akechi's foot. Shit. He steeled himself for the insult that was surely coming now— _throwing a tantrum, like a child_. Pedestrian. Standard. Hanging below him. 

Deep breath.

It would hurt, but he'd live.

"Do you believe that you are the center of the universe?" the old man asked instead. (He was not being mocked, so Akechi found his retort dead in his mouth.) "The times you've had the privilege of— they have not stopped in your absence."

Figure it out. Say something, past the rotting bitter, interrupt the speech like always.

But he couldn't. 

"All exists within this single strand of time," the old man said as if it were simple, "They remember you, the time and time and times that you have left behind."

Therein lies the bullshit. Akechi shook his head. It was a nice try, almost got him to feel bad, but no. "It's a repeating loop. Same players on the same board."

Like chess.

"You know that it is not." The beady eyes were trained on him and Akechi wished they weren't. "They live on in your absence. This is something you understand. Don't lie."

A _liar_? "I'm not _stupid—"_

"If you thought it was all 'the same', immutable, _fated_ , you would not be attempting to change."

"I'm always the same."

"Then, did you ruin that boy's life for fun?"

"What."

"The Trickster has… ah. Replaced you, this time."

Replaced. This happens to replaceables, said Yagami, and the gun said something big was different this time. Akechi pushed his hands into his hair, found stickywet, put them down by his sides instead. "What does that mean."

The old man curled his free hand shut. "You spoke to him. That had a consequence, which had a consequence, which had a consequence." The fingers in the noose wiggled to the tune, Akechi wanted to cover his ears but that's too close to the part of his head that wasn't there anymore. "He has been removed from his journey and slotted into yours. Excuse my impertinence, but.. we know how that ends. So. Did you do it for nothing, then?"

Stickywet warm and quickly cooling, a shiver down Akechi's spine that would not stop. "I was trying to help," he said, for once something that did not ring false. The old man still smiled down on him.

"No, you weren't. Do not lie."

Akechi waved his hands, the stickywet reward for _helping_ reflecting what little light there was in the yard, but the old man quirked an eyebrow.

"You gave up. Do not lie."

"I—"

Chose a bullet instead of a freely extended hand, and both of them knew it. 

"Did you just want to know how it felt?"

Stickywet. 

"I." he whispered. 

***

The moment Akechi woke up, crick in his neck for the ages, he decided to fuck it and do the pancakes one again. Just to be sure about it. He pretended to forget about the talking cat, this time, and again walked directly into a trap that wasn't even set for him. 

Akechi caught the steel in Joker's face before he’d even finished approaching. He had never _missed_ anything. Akechi really was a fool, to think he could beat the best among them at his own game, but nonetheless he smiled and feigned through his supposedly ignorant teeth.

If Joker knew so quickly about the liar in their midst... Well. They all must.

It was a painful, honest wait for the shoe to drop. Akechi went patiently through the machinations— a risky business in itself, death behind every variant door, but... no, they all trusted him in the end. Days drew out into months, dwindled towards the inevitable. Joker's lips parted. Akechi shot him anyway.

Bang!

He almost laughed, cracked his character wide open then and there, but no. Akechi settled for winking at the camera. Joker didn't do it this time, the wink, so someone had to.

He waited in the blindspot hallway, clearing his notifications one by one in a tense wait for the pop, the smell of a plan that went off without a hitch. Akechi was not disappointed. Joker pulled the fast one on him, and now the curtains were drawn on the night's performance for everybody. Time to go home.

Akechi made it out of the building with no incident, and would have seen the November 20th stars for the first time had he been looking up when he left the copshop in someone's head. Instead, he stared down.

_I'll see you tomorrow_ , said the text he sent to Joker— or, to another false name in his extremely bugged phone. At this point, it didn't matter. The pieces were unchangably in place.

***

A sharp knock rapped against the front door, or perhaps Akechi's skull. For a moment he wondered if he'd miscalculated, overslept the next day in his apartment with a hangover for the ages— no. Probably not. He was definitely at Leblanc, or somewhere else that smells like coffee and guilt.

He opened his eyes and regretted it instantly. Kitagawa— probably, blue— was looking in his direction, Sakamoto facing away and being a little too loud to hear. Talking about… hiding? If Akechi focused he could pick it out.

"That's not Ann!" Sakamoto said to Kitagawa.

He's right. This knock was a son of a bitch’s alarm clock. Certainly woke him up just fine from across his apartment, certainly woke him up fine just now stacked against a headache straight from Hell. The rapping stopped before picking up again, angrier now, onetwothreefour. Exactly the way Makoto warns doors to get out of her way. It has ten one-thousands before she breaks it down.

One one-thousand.

Akechi glanced around one last time. He was certainly in Leblanc, slumped in the booth closest to the stairs. He could see the door rattle under Makoto’s fist.

Three one-thousand. This headache is going to kill him. His hands, he noticed, were tied to the bottom of the table. Kidnapped, for one reason or another. This was always possible but certainly stupid.

Six one-thousand. Kitagawa dove behind the counter, leaving Sakamoto alone in the middle of the dust. Oh— hiding. He must know Makoto is coming in no matter what. Eight one-thousand. That’s not a bad strategy at all. 

Quickly, Akechi leaned back against the seat. Better to play possum than get his eardrums blown out by— 

"What the _SHIT_ is going on here?" (Apparently, the door wasn't locked. If Akechi's hands hadn't been tied to the bottom of the table, he'd massage his temples.) "What the FUCK are y— What the FUCK do you think you're doing with HIM?"

It worked. Akechi’s supposedly unconscious body avoided the lecture.

"Uh…"

"RYUJI."

Ha. Sakamoto's problem now, if not for Akechi's aching head. 

"... Yyyyeesss….?" Sakamoto doesn't need to play stupid, but he does it anyway. "Hi, Makoto. You… look nice… tonight…"

In his mind's eye he could see Makoto straightening her shirt, or her skirt, or her coat, or her hair, or something. "Thank you." A metallic noise announced she was holding something heavy that could probably hurt someone a lot. 

“I MEAN! YOU ALWAYS LOOK NICE.”

"Care to tell me what exactly you think it is that you're doing?"

Isn’t that the question of the hour. If anything startled Akechi in the next minute, it was Kitagawa’s voice in the conversation. "We… relocated Akechi. Ann, myself, and Ryuji. It was a secret. Nobody else is involved at all."

Makoto took a couple of small steps, clunking her shoes on the floor. The idiot painter had probably stood up, scared her— he'll be lucky if he survives it. If it had been Akechi, or, an Akechi stupid enough to not keep his mouth shut, he wouldn’t have moved an inch from the floor. 

Simultaneous reactions ("Dude!" / " _WHY._ ”) rattled around in the room. Knowing Kitagawa— an idiot— he’d probably tell the truth.

"To kill him."

Oh. Hm.

"... I'm joking. That was a joke.” 

Of course it was. Of course it would be. The Phantom Thieves of Hearts would be worse than a simple pain in his ass if they _actually_ killed people. Then again, his head does hurt. Maybe they’re gunning for his job after all.

A thunk announced Makoto hitting something very flashy against the bar. She’d gotten better at flexing since the last time he’d seen her do this song and dance. “Not funny, Yusuke.”

“I disagree," (and he did, Akechi could hear the smile on his face,) "but nonetheless. I was simply asked to help by Ann and Ryuji. I don't know what their actual plan is."

Makoto rounded audibly on Sakamoto— Akechi could end the little charade now, but for what. It was all a moot point in the end… Plus, if _she_ was going to kill him, it would have been years ago, or last month when he was supremely unhelpful with anything that wasn't drinking Niijima's liquor.

Who _was_ Joker dating, now, anyway...?

A chair scraped the ground. Someone took a seat in the very awkward pause.

"We aren't. You know." (Akechi doesn't need to be looking to know Sakamoto is making a gesture: _kill him._ ) "Even though I want to. Shit. I'm not gonna lie, I wanna so bad."

Akechi felt that in his chest, the truth of being stopped at the door and laid out on the ground in a graceless heap. Sixteen is late for a first, but Sakamoto's made good on it once… Or, twice, if you count sloppy headrolling mistakes Samerecarm can't fix. Akechi certainly does.

Makoto tapped her shoe again.

"And would you be the one that explains it to Haru?"

Oh, fascinating, the team has split worse than this headache that he can’t quite ignore. Sakamoto hissed between his teeth, short, before managing to figure out a new line. "No offense, Queen, but why are _you_ even here."

Redirection. Always the best way to throw Makoto off.

"... I asked you first."

Elegant. She was keeping a secret, holding the bad news close to her heart until the last possible second.

Sakamoto, of course, was ignorant of this. "I wanna stop him."

With what, a pipe? A baseball bat? A kitchen knife. It would be Skull’s choice, an unfortunate rage incident could arrange it all in a supernatural blink to shake Leblanc’s foundation and give sweet little Ryuji a record score.

"It looks like you've done it,” Makoto said, blandly enough that he might have thought her… what, displeased? It certainly wasn’t about Akechi's sorry state. Maybe Sakamoto was making a face.

"What? No. Not Akechi. Friggin' Akechi can rot. Unless friggin' Akechi _does_ rot, Joker's not gonna stay in bed."

Ah. So he is alive...

"So you want to kill, or, er, rot? Akechi… in real life, in Leblanc."

"Ugh, no, c'mon! Listen. Listen listen. You know what Joker'll say if they find each other again."

No.

"No, I don't, Ryuji, please, enlighten me."

"Don't play stupid. You know he'd say like," Sakamoto cleared his throat, " _All-right, welcome back_. And then go on a speech about, gah, I dunno, the effin' power of forgiveness or something. I don't think I could stand it." No…?

"What do—"

"You _know_ what I mean! _He's_ the one who got shot and _he's_ forgiving Akechi and _we'd_ have to take it, cause _he's_ our leader. And he would take back a guy who just shot him in the head after getting him beat to absolute shit by a bunch of—"

Sakamoto bit hard down on the edge of that sentence. Swallowed it, for Makoto’s sake, but it didn’t matter. They all knew what was supposed to be there, _a bunch of dirty cops._

… As if it would ever get that far, anyway. He wouldn’t— 

"So… we're killing Akechi in Leblanc."

"No! I think it’s bullshit but he lives!"

That makes… several of them, who think it’s all bullshit.

“Then?”

Kitagawa made himself present again, easily, as if he’d never dropped out of the conversation. "I believe Ryuji and Ann want to stop Joker from talking to Akechi at all."

"So you've all just decided to, what, commit war crimes?"

A pause for a pindrop. Akechi could swear he heard a phone buzz.

"To be fair, he is quite literally a terrorist."

"It's still a war crime, Yusuke."

“And Futaba?”

Kitagawa sounded proud of himself, the statement was loaded in a way that Akechi could taste. What the Hell does that mean, _and Futaba._ Sakura doesn’t have a spine to her name.

“We aren’t doing that now.”

Never one to press an interesting point. Makoto's redirected shoes clacked loudly across the room, towards him. Of course they did, God is not nice to Akechi. She threw whatever was in her hands onto the opposite seat. He could feel her moving shadow on his face, which was fine.

She was looking at him. He wouldn’t crack for her. No way.

“What did you do, Ryuji.”

“I… got him?”

“With WHAT.”

Without waiting for an answer, Makoto stuck her hands directly into Akechi’s hair.

"OW!"

Immediately she'd found the hole (it isn't a hole, it's a _laceration_ , Akechi already learned what a hole would be) in his head. His yell didn't startle her, or elicit any reaction at all other than, "Oh good. You're not dead." 

"Jesus—!!"

He was hard pressed to tell if she was joking or not, which didn't stop Makoto from asking a question. "Did Ann already get to this?"

“What?”

“Shut up,” Makoto said down her nose to him.

"Three times. That one’s sticky." came Sakamoto’s reply from the corner of the kitchen. However he’d gotten there (threatened, more likely than not, by whatever Makoto had been holding) he was certainly making the most of it, serving himself dinner. Sakura Sojiro’s curry. An opportunity arises.

“May I have some?”

Makoto scoffed. “One, no, two, shut up, three, take a deep breath."

He didn't have time to ask what the Hell that was supposed to mean, which was unfortunate. Makoto slapped her hand over the wound with no hesitation, sending the world spinning again— he'd swear her eyes were lit up blue, green, bluegreen bright enough to hurt. 

In the next second, when he realized his head was hurting less, it became clear that Makoto's eyes were lit up blue-green-bluegreen, but she was already again turning around to snap.

"You can't just expect us to play god every time you feel like bludgeoning someone half to death—"

… Play…? Oh, _Hell_ , Akechi's head _._ "Did you just DIA me?"

"It was a Diarahan, now shut your mouth. Ryuji—"

"It was _not_ a Diarahan, I still feel awful."

"That's what you get for being bludgeoned half to death and if you open your mouth again I will send you the rest of the way myself. RYUJI."

Sakamoto watched Akechi the way Sakamoto would watch a loaded gun, and Akechi would know. "Yeah ma'am?"

"I'm calling the others."

Kitagawa reminded everyone of his presence by standing fast enough to tip his chair back. Surprisingly, he was also fast enough to catch it before it slammed into the ground. Twisted and turned, he said, "No! No. Don't."

"Yusuke?" Makoto turned fully to face the chaos. “What’s… wrong...”

Perfect. Akechi maneuvered in on the lead while he had the chance, facing Makoto's back. "Oh, I'm with him on that one." (As if it mattered, Sakamoto edged closer to Kitagawa, who unpretzeled himself more elegantly than he should have been able to.) "If you snitch, this gets messy."

She went rigid, hackles raised.

" _Snitch!?_ "

Got her. 

He leaned forward in his seat, the nicer side of his head down against the table. "We've discussed this, you're a narc."

Because he was leaning forward, Makoto missed him when she swung her fist in his direction. Akechi was in a prime spot to see the surprise-outrage-hypocrisy on Sakamoto's face, but all that was for nothing— if she'd have hit him, she'd have lost, like always. This was routine for them, as easy as anything else in the Niijima household.

Of course. Not easy in the slightest.

"A _narc_ ," he continued, sitting up straight again, "Who has even less of an idea when to quit than I do, and I'm a _terrorist._ "

Up close, so suddenly up close and in his face, Makoto smelled antiseptic enough to take the sour out of Akechi's mouth. "You talk a big game considering you don't know about anything _outside_ of killing people."

How quickly they adjusted to this new set of information, ripe for the bitching.

"At least I know how to do _something._ " He sneered to match her scowl. Makoto leaned back, behind her Sakamoto edged closer but he doesn't stand a chance. Akechi showed them his teeth. "You ruin people's lives without even trying!"

"What, is waving a gun around supposed to be a credential now?"

"I was invited onto this team—"

Left hand on the table BANG! to interrupt him. " _YOU BLACKMAILED US!_ "

"... And you got here _how,_ Makoto, please—"

"Unlike your sanctimonious self-important ass, I—"

" — managed to make a massive mess with a mobster too low-level for me to even murder?"

" — put a pin in that right there I want to get back to it, but FUCK you, I made friends like a _normal person_ —"

"Once _you_ were done with the blackmail!"

"WHAT is it with you and blackmail! Why are you fixated on the blackmail, Akechi!"

("Uh, Makoto…" Sakamoto tried to cut in but they’re busy because Makoto just opened a can of it now.)

"I'm sorry if _you_ don't remember all your petty little breakdowns that you went off on _before_ you made your little ‘friends.’"

If his hands weren't tied to the table he'd stand to look her in the face. She obviously had the same thought, leaning down to his level, and it was only when she obliged him this way that Akechi considered this might have been a rhetorical mistake.

"Oh! Are we _talking_ petty now, are we just _talking_ petty or do I have to fetch your dartboard and all the pictures—"

SHIT. 

"You’re getting into PICTURES with me. Seriously? I can get into PICTURES."

" — like all the ones of the TV anchors that you made ME swiss cheese for you because you're AWFUL at darts, mister Akechi please for the love of GOD call me Akechi I will DIE if you call me by my GIVEN NAME on television Akechi fucking Goro? Not to mention... the rest."

_The rest._ She could have killed him just then, but held back, to show him mercy or fairness or something. Awful move.

"You do that," Akechi said, dangerous quiet, falsely bright, "and I'll strike you down where you stand… But if you're going all the way home anyway out of the goodness of your heart, you should bring the digital camera you were using to spy on them for Kobayakawa. Unless it wasn’t for Kobayakawa at all, and you were just a lonely little girl spying to spy…?"

(The sound of Kitagawa’s voice reminded Akechi he was alive. "Spying…?")

Makoto replanted her feet.

"Are you trying to drag _them_ into this? Can’t fight your own battles against someone who knows you’re coming? Are you that bad at face to face or are you just the five year old that everybody treats you like?"

"Ugh."

" _Ugh?_ Is that what you have to say for yourself?"

"No, _ugh_ is what I have to say to you. Please keep up, Makoto, for once."

"Ugh, keep up for once, he says, when _I'm_ not the one tied to a table!"

"And _I_ —"

"AND _I'm_ not the one with half a concussion!"

Only half! "That’s on you! It's YOUR healing that sucks!"

"Wrong!" Makoto’s hand slipped off the table to push through her hair, and suddenly she was looking down on him again, “You’re an undiscovered type of idiot, you know that!”

"You're the one who's wrong, half-bit half-wit!" 

(He'd stolen her next move. The room would smell electric if that was how Frei smelled.

”Hey, Makoto…”)

"Deadpan all you like, dipshit, you couldn't patch a paper cut!"

"I didn't need to, I wasn't a... fuckup!"

That got Makoto to laugh, just once. It sounded like stepping on a landmine and took exactly as much composure out of them both, haggard corpses staring each other down. Neither of them were foolish enough to think it was over, though, another beat and she was back in it. 

"You call YESTERDAY not being a fuckup!? Really!? Riddle me how, I'll wait!"

The air in the room stilled. He had nothing to say in his own defense, except, "I did what I set out to do.”

"I take it back, you don't know _anything_! You don’t know how to do _shit_! Joker is ALIVE, you—"

"I'm aware."

"AND— Wait. You—" Makoto was suddenly quiet, sharp, as a knife hidden within a sleeve. All at once, bravado and oneupmanship were over— this was so far away from the script, from the realm of anything she could have expected, that she’d locked up for free. He hadn't earned it, but she'd lost. "You're what."

It was brittle to hear. Akechi closed his eyes. He didn't want to see her cry like this.

"I... didn't want to kill him."

It rung in the heavy air, a simple truth that circled Makoto and her clawed hands as she breathed. He really is just cheating now. Damn it.

"Then why would you shoot?"

He could be God-honest; end Makoto’s short-lived wait to hear why he isn’t a fuckup after all, or at least, not yet. He could explain to her in excruciating detail the intimate processes of fucking up— bleeding, choking, ending in a sickening crunch instead of making it through to the November 20ths where the mess did not clean itself up in a pop of ozone. He could explain to her that bloody heaping messes did not always clear up in pops of ozone, and, also, he could let her in on the secret that his heels were always backed up against, that wasn’t a secret at all, but they’d probably need a drink for all that, and this is an upstanding coffee shop. Sakura Sojiro would card them, for sure.

That wouldn't be fun.

Throughout all of this, Makoto waited for the wind to stop whistling in his head. It was very polite of her, to hold her breath for so long.

"What kind of a friend would I be,” Akechi said, opening his eyes at last, “if I didn't rough up your ex a little?"

The tears came suddenly. They always did, because nothing can be easy in the Niijima house. None of it meant anything— past them, Akechi watched Makoto’s eyes light up with the familiar killing intent. Oh well. At least all this wasn’t a waste. That bastard Joker had made it through after all, and Makoto was a second away from lunging at his throat— a new death, to boot. This was all good to know.

Still. It wouldn't be free. With dignity, Akechi prepared to bite her, but a motion over Makoto's shoulder caught his eye too late. If he'd have seen it a second before, he would have laughed, put a pause on the whole thing, but it wasn't to be.

A hand, extended, breached Makoto's personal space.

She whirled and threw a punch, just like she had on one of her eighteenth birthdays… Not her fault, of course. She was startled, that's all, and Sakamoto went down like an idiot. 

"Oh, _fuck!_ " Just like that, Makoto remembered herself, and the murder magic was gone. One of Sakamoto’s hands was stuck in the air even as he was flat on his back. "Ryuji!"

When she’d punched _Akechi_ on that one of her birthdays, she’d broken his nose. By the way he didn’t appear to be spewing blood, Sakamoto was luckier about it. "Ow.”

"I'm so—" 

Makoto was silenced instantly by her phone ringer. It was Niijima Sae’s custom text tone, a little abbreviated funeral dirge that they’d picked out in February untouchable. By the way Kitagawa straightened, in the corner of Akechi’s vision, he must recognize it too.

Objectively, Akechi thought, he should have been expecting this. Makoto showed up in the first place to deliver bad news, that apparently had just gotten worse.

Kitagawa, who could see only the sudden sharp raise of her shoulders, was even further in the dark. "Makoto…?"

"Fuck. Hell."

Kitagawa cleared his throat, not conspicuously at all. "Is there a probl…"

"Ryuji. Can you stand."

"In a minute…"

By the look on her face, Akechi could tell that was a minute Sakamoto didn’t have. In three clipped motions, Makoto arranged him over her shoulder, into a fireman's carry. It was impressive, the way she gathered up everything but his dignity.

“YO WHAT THE HELL!”

“Sae thinks you’re the next most likely Phantom Thief and since she's lost the one she had we’re getting on a train, _now_.”

“Put me DOWN?!”

“No.” She strode as if all of Sakamoto was as weightless as the air in his head. "We'll be back. Lock the door. We aren't fucking done."

“HELP!?"

How easily the kidnapper is kidnapped. Akechi wished he could wave, but he tilted his head and smiled a little instead. "Give your sister my regards."

"Ugh!"

The door slammed, and the dust settled. Akechi waited around briefly in the new silence until Kitagawa broke it by walking across the floor and locked the door behind them... before going back to… whatever the Hell he’d been doing this whole time. He’d been busy, if you know what Leblanc usually looks like, and Akechi comes here all the damn time. 

A phone buzzed.

"Where's everyone," Akechi asked eventually, out of nothing but boredom. He wasn’t quite expecting an answer, but received one anyway.

"Busy."

"And the patrons?"

The sound of rearranging did not pause. Kitagawa was moving with purpose. A phone buzzed.

"Leblanc is closed."

"Where's Boss?"

"... I told you. Busy. His son is in a precarious condition." 

Kitagawa was quick on the ball, that time. His voice dripped with undisguised malice. A lot of things could be _precarious_ with a steak-knife edge… but, then again, cockroaches can live without their heads. To survive that, Joker could be nothing else. And he _had_ survived.

“Whatever could you mean?”

It appeared, however, that Kitagawa had run out of things to say to him. He tapped away on his phone, not without throwing dirty looks over the top of it once or twice— The scowl that appeared looked natural on his face, a gash straight across a ruined canvas. Nearly flattering.

Akechi forced an indifference into his voice. "I asked you a question."

"Cram it," Kitagawa muttered into his again-buzzing phone, as if he’d get in trouble were he heard.

"Oh?" There's a nerve, and the corners of Akechi's lips quirked. "Have something else to say, _Inari_?"

Inari, Inari, Inari.

He hadn’t managed to court Sakura this time, God knows what happened there, but the blush shocked up from under Kitagawa's collar all the same. He failed to respond— cutting wit was perhaps out of his wheelhouse after all, leaving him basically a verbal noncombatant at this point. Powerless, except for the fact of things being closed, locked, turned, and Kitagawa being the one to close, lock, and turn them with more purpose than Akechi had ever seen him have.

All of it, suddenly in a silence too heavy for either of them to break, until he noticed what Makoto had left behind when it was in the inkstained hands.

“Hey,” Akechi said, “That’s mine.”

Kitagawa didn’t react, just walked Akechi’s sealed briefcase behind the bar. Why Makoto had it was beyond him— what, had she expected him to have _another_ gun? No, she hadn’t expected him at all. Kitagawa, asking no questions, moved back and affixed a padlock to the silverware drawer. Where the knives are.

_Oh._ The room was being _babyproofed._

"I don't need to get over there to kill myself, you know?" Akechi bit the hard edge off, turned it into a question as if he were speaking from the TV in the corner. "I can make you do it for me." The room could so easily fill with the smell of madness and blood— especially if _all_ of the magic is real after all. "It would be easy to—"

Kitagawa turned around to face him. Maybe it was paranoid of Akechi, but he felt the room go colder. 

" — just, do it." 

His phone buzzed, in his hand, but Kitagawa didn't look at it. "Are you coming?" he asked the ceiling.

It didn't take his impressive IQ for Akechi to tell he wasn't being spoken to. Even so. If they wanted him to shut up they should have gagged him. "God, if you're up there, I would really just _love_ a Kitkat.”

“Tch!”

Oh, Kitagawa would kill him at this rate. If he was always so easy to rile up, Akechi’s missed out on some valuable opportunities over the last few… lives. No. He can’t say it like that, what the fuck is this, a video game. No, no, no.

Footsteps echoed dully into the side of Akechi’s head, even though Kitagawa was standing perfectly still in his field of vision, busy watching for whoever just came down the stairs. It didn’t surprise Akechi that, from Joker’s tiny clown-car of a living space, clowns would be bleeding out, but who wasn’t already accounted for? Okumura? The cat? No, Kitagawa looks too conflicted for it to be— 

Sakura crawled into the booth across from Akechi, settling a big cardboard box firmly next to her on the seat. Sakura, Sakura, Akechi nearly forgot about Iishiki— Sakura Futaba, crouched on the seat like the guy from Death Note, staring him directly in the face. She was going to drop her phone if it stayed balanced on her knee like that, just like the guy from Death Note.

No way. She must be fucking with him, if only someone would laugh.

But what does he know about her, really. Akechi glanced over to Kitagawa, where he was hovering by the bar… Texting. Now that's comedy. Akechi would have to go first. If his hands weren't bound he’d cover his mouth, a gossip's facsimile of shame. “Doesn’t she have a website to be running?”

The answer could potentially be no, at this point— she’d closed it before for less, the official website URL redirecting to a red page that proclaimed only, in bold black letters, FUCK THE PHANTOM THEIVES. Somehow Akechi had maneuvered rhetorically around it, stalling just long enough in a haze of stress and word economy that Shido didn’t knock the brain from his skull. Whatever time that was, it probably would not happen again.

Kitagawa looked up from the darkened screen of his phone. He moved to sit languidly in the booth when he remembered he had somewhere to be. “Excuse me?”

Buzz. Buzz. Their phones shone red like angry text.

A week and a half later, FUCK ONE PHANTOM THIEF IN PARTICULAR appeared online instead, and it was indeed Akechi with the excuses— any other definition of media circus was moot before the spectacle. He had to dance around the fact that he had not a clue what was going on, except that Joker was definitely the One, dollars to mangled interpersonal relationships. Business as usual. Akechi had no reason to think this run _wasn't_ fairly normal, but whatever he did to make Joker have such a falling out with his weird little psuedo-sister would have to be identified and shot on-sight, because _fuck all that._

Wait. Is that why Kitagawa is single. No. Focus.

Akechi dragged it out slowly this time, refusing to call it by its name with his mouth, “Theee weeebsiiiite.”

That fucking website. At the end of it all, to add insult to injury, a redaction (but definitely not an _apology_ ) was posted by the site’s mod. Akechi remembered distinctly his own shaking rage, just talk to each other in real life you _stupid shut-in_ — 

Sakura startled the smile off his face with a sharp sound that Akechi almost didn't realize was supposed to be a laugh. Kitagawa's eyebrows arched, the only indicator she'd also scared the shit out of him. In another second she had him by the sleeve, tugging with both her hands. 

“Oh my God, Inari.”

Kitagawa allowed a "Hm?" to be pulled out of him.

“He thinks— Jesus Christ. He thinks I run the Phansite!”

Akechi had the good sense to keep his fat mouth shut at that, but if Sakura wasn’t running the Phantom Thieves Afe.. Affi… damn it, the Fan Site, what was she doing with her endless amounts of time? 

“Why would he think that? Did we tell him that?"

"WHY would we have told him that."

"That’s… stupid.”

It’s a support role that involves technology and she’s tech support, _thank you,_ but good sense kept Akechi quiet, still. Kitagawa started leaning side to side in his seat from how hard Sakura was shaking him. 

“Oh my _God he thinks I’m Nishima._ ”

Nishima. Nishima. No bells for any Nishimas, there must be another loser running around at Shujin.

Kitagawa blinked for the first time in this entire conversation. “Mishima?”

Bad news: good sense was just found dead. Akechi couldn’t stop his mouth from opening, no coming back from this kind of shock, it turns out they actually _work,_ and Joker dumped him on his ass _anyway_ , _“THE SUPPORT GROUP GUY?_ ”

Despite the fact that he was still being shaken, Kitagawa suddenly stilled. The temperature dropped just enough for Akechi to realize that he'd made a mistake. 

“How do you know that."

There was no good answer to the question. “Ah.” 

"... Ah! Is that what he has to say! Ah!" That got Sakura moving, her hands suddenly spinning in the air to power her mouth. “Has he been _stalking people?_ Wait. No. He hasn’t. Of course not. He can’t be a stalker. Inari.”

“Futaba?”

“There’s no WAY he got around me, right? He’s a fucking idiot!”

“Mhmm.”

(Akechi scoffed at that one, just to remind them he was there— a _fucking_ idiot, diagnosed by the biggest one herself and in the third person no less. She ignored him, her turning hands tapping on the table. Kitagawa watched her out of the corner of his eye, the way he does.)

“I don’t blame him for not noticing my sexy, sexy bug, but the one that I replaced was obvious! If he’d known it was there... he would have noticed it was gone? Right? It was ugly as HELL and anyone would have noticed it was gone?”

“YOU bugged me?” When when when, think back for the gremlin with her hands on his laptop. Never. “WHEN?”

“She re-bugged you, technically.”

Kitagawa never looked more punchable, Jesus. It probably wasn’t his laptop. Phone. Phone. She’d touched his phone, stolen it just once, God _damn it all to Hell._ Respond.

"She's bugging me now, is what she’s doing!" Talking to Kitagawa would get him nowhere so Akechi rounded on Sakura instead. She'd break and talk to him eventually, damn it. "Do you have a point with this, or...?"

Her eyes, dead on him if they weren’t staring a thousand yards past him, would have scared him if Akechi could still feel fear. "Inari.” 

He hummed, turning his face towards her.

“The esteemed detective has no idea what the Hell is going on."

She’s like the old man, Akechi realized, or at least he thought so until she decided to actually see him. Sakura's gaze suddenly caught fire, caught _him_. However Akechi would have contradicted that… well. It was moot now, he was caught with his lip between his teeth and probably looking extremely pissed about it.

"What?” Kitagawa sounded genuinely surprised but Akechi couldn’t spare the second to check, “How do you figure?"

“See, he had me going too, when he decimated Mako-chan, but look at him!" Sakura threw a careless hand in his direction. "When do you think was the last time he _had_ the handle?"

"Likely before he got kidnapped."

Very funny.

“No, really. Think about it. Think about everything we know about Akechi Goro. When was the last time.” Sakura stood up on the bench from her gremlin crouch without waiting, phone swinging in hand, “‘Cause if you wanna know what I think. it’s that he’s full of BULL-SHIT and he’s been faking it ALL!”

That cracked Akechi’s grin wide open.

“ _LOOK at him!_ "

“Futaba…”

It was a warning from Kitagawa that time. He wanted her to sit but like Hell if Akechi was cooperating— he smiled and it set her off.

"If there was no plan— and there wasn’t…!— You _WINKED!_ " Finally she was talking at him— acknowledging him at last— and it hurt more than he expected, having the words read straight off his teeth, if only he could _stop_ smiling. “Why did you wink!”

“Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be in my head already?” (Phones buzzed in synch, but nobody looked. Again, again, again, and Akechi grinned.) “Shouldn’t you answer that?”

"CUT THE CRAP!" Sakura threw her phone with all the confidence of someone who knew Kitagawa was there to catch it, or all the hubris of someone who didn’t give a damn otherwise. Kitagawa caught it, not that she noticed. “Why!"

It would cost him dearly, Akechi could tell, but he sat up straight like a winner anyway. “It was something Joker would do.”

Sakura, for half a moment, might have clawed his eyes out, but her phone buzzed in Kitagawa’s hand. How convenient.

“Shut that up,” she said to him, again settling down on her haunches like some kind of… animal. Kitagawa did not comply, setting the phone screen-up in front of her, if only he’d take his fingers off of it.

“He says—”

Sakura didn’t pause, now digging in the box. “I know what he said.”

“Do you?”

“No. But I’m busy.” (Red light shone from under Kitagawa’s hand.) “Shut _up._ ”

Kitagawa turned, as if his mother would help him, but no. Neither Sayuri nor the spot on the ceiling he seemed adamant to address offered any answers. In the moment it took him to check, Sakura again found focus on Akechi.

“We’re starting off easy,” she said. “What’s your name.”

“Akechi Goro.”

“No, really.”

“Akechi Goro is my name.”

“Oh, we can do this all night if you’re going to be a bitch about it.”

Joker, in a normal scenario, would tilt his chin and smile at that. Joker in a "beaten to shit" scenario would touch his face, look tired, wait to die. They really did that, somehow, set a cognition up to die, but if it smiles like a duck and doesn't smile like a duck…..

Akechi couldn't touch his face, so he showed his teeth instead. "Is that a threat?"

He can't let that pass unchallenged. This is _Sakura_.

"Do you feel threatened?"

"No."

"Good. I haven’t started threatening you yet."

The scoff was too powerful to hold back. "Semantics is a weak—" 

The second the words left his mouth, Sakura’s hands came out of the box. In them was a gun— no, wait, it isn’t a gun here. Just one of the blasters from his apartment, the yellow one, the important one. The only one that, until now, was still in its original box.

“What’s your name."

He was forced to watch her hands as she tapped her badly-painted nails on one of the only things he owned worth anything other than blood money.

"Akechi Goro," he started carefully, until she pointed the blaster at him, “is the name that people call me.”

“Akechi Goro is not a real name someone would have inflicted on you in, what, nineteen-ninety-eight, and even if someone’s mother hated them that much to call them that there’s _NOT A CHANCE IN HELL AKECHI GORO WOULD PURSUE A DETECTIVE CAREER IN TWENTY-SIX-FUCKING-TEEN!”_

As quickly as she’d lost her composure, riled herself up like some kind of cat, perhaps for a moment looked big, Sakura returned to herself. Almost idly she examined her hostage. “I’d hate to ruin this thing, you know? But I will.”

He almost dared her, _you love Featherman too much,_ but he’d shot Joker. No room for bluffs at the table.

“I’m lost.”

… Perhaps, though, room for idiots, if they remember Kitagawa is there.

“Do you think she’s legally a Sakura?” Akechi asked him, before Sakura could get one in, and before Kitagawa could look anything but disgusted at her name in his mouth Akechi bought another moment. “It’s my stage name. Don’t you like it?”

Sakura recovered by ignoring him and trying to fix God-given stupid, "Jesus, Inari, READ THE CLASSICS."

Ranpo himself couldn't have said it better, or screamed it from the depths of Hell any louder. Akechi decided to ignore Sakura right back, wishing desperately his wrists were free so he could cup his chin. He pulled. No, whatever bound him held fast, so he had to settle for shifting his shoulders at Kitagawa instead. "Fictional detectives have fictional names. What about that is surprising? Do you not think it’s… cute?"

Sakura slammed her hand on the table, pointing again with the blaster. “So you ADMIT you’re a fake!”

"The self is a construct, we are all cogs of the greater machine, to paraphrase Hegel, was that ever a question."

BZZT, but nobody looked.

"What the _fuck_."

He sighed, betraying his annoyance. "You believe I am… a fake, which consequently creates a relationship by which we are both defined. That's how it works."

BZZT. BZZT. Kitagawa spoke, "Are you sure you've read Hegel?" and Akechi decided that if he ever again got the opportunity to shoot someone he knows, Kitagawa checking his phone absolutely comes next.

"Jesus Christ, of _course_ I've read Hegel—"

"I'm not sure that's how it works." Kitagawa's eyebrows arched even as Sakura swatted him to stop. "Are you kidding?"

That was to him. "What—" 

"I asked if you're kidding? Mocking? Joking? Perhaps lying, like a lying liar who lies?"

Akechi didn't have much to do other than stare. His headache was mounting again, challenged for all things on his _philosophy chops,_ God damn Kitagawa at its next convenience. Sakura tapped the table in front of her, inviting Akechi to call.

"This is stupid," Akechi said instead.

"Because it's true?" Her painted nails drifted back towards the delicate lights on the side of her prize, "Or…. what."

"Names are unknowable, life is unwinnable, et cetera until the end of time, what am I really here for."

BZZT. BZZT. BZZT.

Sakura bounced in her seat once, twice, like a crow on a carcass. "Win?"

Oh, fuck.

"Who told you about Mishima's support group."

Redirected. No point in telling the truth, except for her bluff. "Sakamoto."

BZZT.

"Liar," announced Kitagawa, splashed by the red light. Akechi nearly paid for it in plastic, the delicate panels on the side of the gun creaking at the seam where Sakura pressed at it. 

"Try again."

She wasn't bluffing. "Takamaki."

The red lights shone again as the phone buzzed. Sakura glanced down, "Fuck you," before returning her gleaming eye to Akechi's predicament, "I'll buy that."

Before Akechi could affirm, deny, or otherwise make his life a further living Hell, Kitagawa.

"You'll 'buy' that Ann is a snitch?"

He'd nearly forgotten it, but from the box next to her, in Sakura's other hand, came one of his figures. Both of them knew it was cheap, some blindbox deal, and how quickly Feather Green's head rolled when she snapped it off against the edge of the table. "That's for lying."

A fascinating move. "Oh, ignoring your _boyfriend_ now?"

Sakura threw the body of the figure at Akechi, which was more than he expected of her. Ergo, it finished its graceless arc by hitting him smack in the face.

" _That's_ for mocking me." (BZZT. BZZT.) "Shut up."

"Futaba, I don't think Ann would have—"

"Inari, it's not snitching. He's gay."

BZZT. WOAH.

"... I know that." Kitagawa plucked the bodyless head from the table, examining it as one would a gemstone. "But he's not invited, is the problem."

"I wasn't _what,"_ This was too fast, "You know _what,_ I'm _sorry."_

"Sometimes the truth hurts, Goro." Sakura took a deep breath, "Alllll the things we know about you? Sometimes they hurt."

The phone buzzed on the table, but Sakura's eyes didn't waver from Akechi. She wasn't looking him in the face, but down, at… his bloody, ruined shirt.

Kitagawa stilled. Sakura stared.

"Were you lying when you told us about your mom."

BZZZZZT. Sakura apparently threw the finger at the Sayuri, which meant she probably threw the finger at Kitagawa's favorite spot on the ceiling.

"How much free time do you think I have, Sakura."

She turned, still flipping the bird. "Hm?"

"Do you think I can wander around, dropping a false tragic backstory on people, for my health or something?"

"He stoppeth one of three," Kitagawa muttered, more to himself than anyone else.

Akechi didn't dare to call him _Inari_ while Sakura had the rhetorical upper hand, but this wasn't a diversion— if anything, her confusion was plainer than Akechi's own. So he compromised, and asked. "... Have something to share with the class?"

The cheap plastic of Feather Green's visor flashed in the low light as Kitagawa held it flat in his palm, delivered, "God save thee from the feinds that plague you so, Ancient Mariner, what's with that stupid look on your face."

Akechi blinked. 

"Earth to Inari…?"

Kitagawa's fist curled. "I read one classic."

Sakura shook her bangs into her face, then pushed them out again. Refreshed, apparently, she soldiered forward. "Did you lie, in your… orphan story."

Akechi tapped his knuckles against the support of the table. "I think you made an incorrect assumption."

"What's that."

"I'm not an orphan." (Kitagawa scowled again, which was the only thing that clued Akechi in to the fact that at one point he'd stopped scowling.) "I never told you I was, I just never told you I wasn't. Factually, now that you ask, I'm not."

"So, what, were you trying to… relate to me, or whatever? When you lied?"

"When did I lie to you, Sakura."

"About your mom! You just said—"

"I never told you I was an orphan, is what I said. My mother killed herself in 2004. I was at school. Someone called it in, I suppose, because my teacher took me to her home and let me watch _Signal Samurai_ until the police arrived, which took a long time, because my house was also burning down at the time. Do you have anything of substance to ask me or shall I detail my fraught experiences with group home living next."

He thought he'd enjoy seeing her squirm, but no. Something about the way Sakura shifted in her position made him feel worse with every word… So, obviously, he'd upped the ante and overshared until he couldn't stand it anymore.

"I'm sorry," Sakura said eventually. It was very plain, _I'm sorry,_ but was there anything else to be said. Disgusting.

"I don't want your pity."

“Choke, then.” Kitagawa swung himself around in the booth, now sitting crosslegged to match Sakura’s odd crouch. He didn’t seem to be in the vicinity of fucking around, but… It’s Kitagawa. “Did you kill Okumura Kunikazu.”

Akechi struggled to keep his composure, God, what a _lark_. “Oh. Absolutely.”

“He didn’t even hesitate!” Sakura pointed straight between Akechi’s eyes, impressive since she was staring directly at Kitagawa. “Did you see that, Inari!”

“Why would I hesitate? That one was a public service.”

BZZT. BZZT. Kitagawa wedged his phone between his knee and the seat. “At a press conference?"

“I do not control the length of the wick attached to the hearts of the wicked. I just light them, once in a while.” If he was smug, it was because he’d been saving the line for ages. Yagami wouldn’t have appreciated that one in a million years. “I shot him dead on the spaceship, one step behind your little merry band. The old man dropped dead on this side of his own accord.“

“But what about Haru!”

That was Sakura, and he needed to lean a little bit to look her in the face past the shadows on it. “What about Okumura’s fiance?”

Sakura drew away from him. Got her and she knows it. Akechi really should bite the bullet and stab him, too, just to make it fair, but he wasn't finished talking.

“The good CEO should have known it was coming anyway. He’s seen it enough, and sent me to do it plenty.” Akechi watched Kitagawa’s mouth open, “No, he wasn’t my ‘boss’, or whatever you’re about to ask me. Every bastard in this stupid city is aquainted in one way or another— and, anyway my actual boss had at least six guns in that press conference room ready to go if Okumura hadn’t imploded himself. So. I guess technically my boss killed dearly departed...”

“Kunikazu.” Kitagawa retrieved his phone, typing idly. 

“Right. Of course.” Akechi smiled, as he did when interviews were over. “Now may I please—” 

“Who’s your boss?”

He just dropped it, which was what he’d been expecting from someone with even less interrogative grace than Sakura. “Ahaha, I’m not at liberty to s—”

Akechi had been looking apologetically away from Kitagawa, a sweeping sarcasm that would have hit them both if he hadn’t locked eyes with Sakura in that second. 

Mistake. 

"Did you kill Iishiki Wakaba."

Redirection. The question hit him like a station wagon, if it was even a question— she knew. She knew and she knew and there was no room left for air.

"DID YOU."

No room for air but maybe for doubt and if he were different he'd be smiling but it hurt. He couldn't look at her, suddenly, closed his eyes and focused on the frantic tapping sounds. Kitagawa. Keeping up with the other side of the phone. Not calling an ambulance for the fallen in the road.

Nobody screamed.

"I can't feel my hands," he said. Which was a lie, because they hurt. He opened his eyes again.

"That isn't," She brought the heel of her hand down hard on her red phone, to silence whoever was calling for good, "an _answer._ "

She's right, and after he’d just been so forthcoming, this was almost unfair. Choke the words out. "So what do you want?"

"The truth! You can’t blue-screen on me _now._ ”

She clenched her fists so tightly he thought she might break her precious bargaining chip, so long forgotten in her left hand. She would, should, and can kill him for _an answer,_ much less an answer and a show of teeth.

"And if I did?" Silence, except for his wet breathing. Get a _grip._ "If I am an awful, no-good, parriciding shell of a human being with a death wish to boot who just shot the best person any of us knows in cold blood? What do you do then?"

Sakura stared at his ruined shirt.

"And if—"

"Shut up." Sakura snapped it at him. Akechi complied, more out of surprise. "I would tell you to shut up."

Kitagawa humored his phone, but shifted, now holding one hand out palm up.

Sakura continued, "I would tell you to shut up because I think you're lying. I think you know more than you're pretending to. I think you're a fucking fool."

At that, she unclenched one of the fists on her knees, put the hand in Kitagawa's, and shook. She was shaking, Sakura Futaba.

Akechi laughed, if the guttural sound he made could qualify. "You're worse than the old man, you know that?"

She didn't acknowledge the comment. Kitagawa made a phone-gesture equivalent of _go on, keep talking, you idiot son of a bitch_.

"If you want the truth, Sakura? I'm going to die. You'll kill me, I'll kill myself, you know how it goes… And then I'll wake up worse for wear in some execution yard from the God-damn blue period where some nosy old man will LEAP down my throat and ask me what I learned, this time."

Again, the phones began their frantic leaps. They started buzzing and did not stop, a synchronized dance ignored by them all.

"You know what the answer is? I _learned_ my life sucks WAY MORE than I thought. Every time, it's just another nail in my coffin, if only I could just. Stay. Dead. That's crazy, right? That I just keep getting up and doing it all again and again and agai—"

"He winked." Akechi blinked at being cut off, by Kitagawa of all people. "It was something Joker would do, you said."

"That's it."

"Because you saw it."

"Bingo."

"So you knew this was a plot, the entire time, from the start."

Akechi shrugged. It hurt, reminded him of bones a little bit. “It wasn’t always.”

“What do you mean by _that._ ”

"Oh. You know. Less or more."

Kitagawa clicked his tongue again, the sharp _tsk_ all he left Akechi to work with as he turned back to his phone. The red light washed over them, and as he hastily scanned the messages he’d missed. Akechi could tell it wasn’t good. “Futaba, I think he’s—”

“You think he’s what, Inari.”

“I think there’s something wrong with Joker.”

“ _WHAT.”_

She took hers up with urgency, love, primal panic of loss.

“See,” Akechi said, idly, “This is why I don’t care about anyone.”

“Shut up.”

“But did he die?"

For all of Akechi's luck, it must be Joker choking on the redline.

“Stop,” Kitagawa said, clearly, before turning his phone screen towards Akechi for the moment. Clear as day, immediately following strings of panicked gibberish about… jail?: _stop. im fine._

“No, he’s fine.” Sakura sighed, then shoved Kitagawa out of the booth so suddenly he hardly had time to unfold, hit the ground with his joints instead of his head. 

“Hey!”

“Did you kill my mother.”

Right back on task, and now in a hurry. 

Any of the shitty veneer Akechi had managed to slap back on was cracked in the instant under the wheels. Without Kitagawa to look at, they were forced to lock eyes with each other. “Will you take me at face value if I tell you?”

For once, a genuine question. If she says yes, and he says yes, she might just snap and take his head with her— wins couched in awful losses, the way of the game. What kind of gory details would she shove him out of existence for?

Kitagawa, in his invisible-unless-observed way, apparently peeled himself off the floor and returned to his spot. Sakura was too deep in thought to correct this obvious mistake.

“If you’re from the future,” she said to Akechi, “tell me something.”

He tsked. Couldn’t help it, the hissing sound of missing his stop on November 20th. “I’m not from the future. If anything I’m from the past.”

“Goro. What am I about to do next.”

Akechi couldn’t even form a guess before she lifted the blaster and shot it at him, the light and the sound startling him into flinching.

“No,” She said, voice trembling, “I won’t believe you. I think you’re a liar.”

“Then I didn’t kill her and I’m not sorry.”

Before he could think better of the words they were out. Conversational control slipped out of his hands so quickly he almost felt it go. He saw Sakura snap.

“THAT’S _BULLSHIT_! THAT’S THE MOST OBNOXIOUS THING I’VE EVER HEARD! THAT’S— !!" 

"... Cheating," Kitagawa supplied.

"CHEATING—!!" Sakura jumped, on her feet again. "Cheating! That's exactly it, you're cheating! If you're cheating, why can't you win!”

_“_ I—”

_“You_ _filthy savescummer!_ "

Akechi winced. That’s exactly how he’d put it if video game terminology didn’t make him break out into hives. “I don’t know! It’s different every time!” No, it shouldn’t be. It really shouldn’t be, but it is, but it shouldn’t be, and in his defense Akechi lied, “It’s Groundhog Day!”

“Oh, I know that one,” Kitagawa said, “It’s definitely not Groundhog Day.”

Always _the most difficult bastard on the wretched Earth_ , Akechi rounded on Kitagawa hard enough to tip the table towards him. “WHY DO YOU KNOW GROUNDHOG DAY AND NOT AKECHI KOGORO!?”

Kitagawa shrugged, slammed his elbows down on his side to fix the tilt. “It’s a classic! I don’t know!”

Sakura had something devastating to say based on the half-crazed look in her eye, but the rattling of the Leblanc doorknob interrupted too quickly.

“Ann,” said Kitagawa, “Finall—" 

"Inari," She crouched again, leaned on his shoulder with no regard for his half-finished thought, "You gave Ann the key. Remember."

“Hello?~ Open up!~”

“Oh God,” Sakura said, frozen, “Haru.”

“Oh God,” Akechi said, feeling it in his shoulder, “Okumura.”

“She’s going to kill you!"

“Oh, that’s going to suck.”

“If she sees you, she's going to kill _US!"_

“Oh, sucks to suck.”

Sakura glanced around, as if the locked-up coffee shop would help them.

"Guys!~ I _know_ you're in there."

Oh God, she's definitely holding an axe. Sakura shook herself out, but not fast enough to mask the shudder Akechi knew shot up her spine. "Okay. Okay. Next time this happens, tell us this up front."

"What do you mean, _next time._ " (She held up her hands, and the one not holding the toy gun was not empty. It didn't take a second for him to identify it— Curse Paper.) "Oh."

"I have a key!" Haru announced from the door. "Are you suuure you want me to use it!"

Akechu didn't realize he couldn't see Kitagawa until he felt his hands free at last. He drew up from under the table swiftly, unable to hide the knife up his sleeve fast enough.

"Have you also been primed to kill me this whole time?"

Kitagawa shrugged, a lopsided impatient gesture. 

"Less or more," Sakura translated, as if it were necessary.

"Great." There had been no point to sitting through this, except for the fun of losing his ass in rhetorical warfare. Great. Great! "Don't stab me."

Kitagawa had the gall to look disappointed, if only for a moment— whether it was the contagious nature of the Call or just his face, Akechi didn't know.

("Sorry, Haru," He called, walking towards the door and holding it firmly shut. "I was in _the bathroom_.")

Sakura tilted her head. That's a cue.

("Oh! Yusuke! I knew you wouldn't leave me on the porch!")

The bathroom at Leblanc was small, but... Not the least amount of dignity he's ever had, honestly. Even so. "Upstairs?"

She gestured at herself. "Taken."

"Okay."

("One second, I seem to have mispl--" Kitagawa made a great show of hitting the ground to interrupt himself.

"Are you okay!")

Doubt crossed over Sakura's face and didn't leave.

"What is it now."

"I dunno." She rocked back and forth on her feet. "I didn't think… It would feel bad."

("My apologies, Haru, I need a moment…")

He killed her mother. It _shouldn't_ feel bad.

"I'm willing you all my Featherman stuff," Akechi said instead, "Take care of it."

("Take your time!")

Time. If only there was any left, and yet _still_ she hesitated. "Look," he said, "Get out of here. give it to me and I'll do it."

Sakura, in a flash of a second, looked as pissed as she'd been all night. "You're stupid."

"We're—"

_Out of time_ , he was going to tell her, but she just muttered one last thing at him. Sakura slammed her open palm into his chest and he fell.

***

“Do you truly understand the game that you believe you are playing?"

The old man was growing impatient with him, but unfortunately Akechi was a master at dealing with angry bastards of old men, even despite the headache he had. “Ugh,” he replied past the hellsmoke in his throat, “Shoulda picked the knife.”

“Pay attention."

Akechi looked. The old man, tied by one wrist, was staring directly into him, where the Curse Paper made a crooked indention in his chest. It seemed like a flashier thing, from the outside… But now he knows. Oh well.

The old man could tell he was not paying attention, and snapped his fingers.

"Testy."

“I believe." He paused. A fraught place to do it. "I believe that you require a visual aid. Behold, time,” The old man’s free hand— has he ever had a free hand?— trailed up the rope, tracing its… frays. That rope has definitely never been frayed. “Behold, yourself,” The old man soundlessly flicked his longest fingernail against his thumb, easily beholdable in the moment that its sharp edge found the rope called time. It didn't cut as much as pressure two or three new frays into springing from newly broken fibers. 

Akechi expected, perhaps, an audible snap or two. If they happened, he missed them all under the anonymous wails of despair that might as well have been his own for how loud they were.

“Do you understand?" 

Akechi was asked this by an old man strung up by one wrist in Purgatory. "Not in the slightest!"

If the reply was bright, the old man didn't notice. "You are fragmenting a single timeline. You are fragmenting the fragments of a single timeline."

"And?"

"If you continue— If enough time is ground under your bootheel— it will collapse."

"So?"

Akechi grinned. He couldn't help it. Apathy was out of style, the world was ending.

"With your own hands you will bring about the ruination of all."

"Me, too?"

The joke did not land, and neither did the earnest question. The old man appeared in desperate need of… something.

"Do you understand the pack of corpses you are leaving behind?"

"No one better than me."

"Did we not already discuss the resounding consequences of your actions."

God save, among the dead Jokers, the one that has to deal with Yagami, but Akechi only gave an exaggerated shrug in the yard's eerie gloom. 

“Are you truly this blasé about leaving your newest death to the Hermit?”

Bloody messes do not always clean themselves up in pops of ozone, and that one _almost_ made Akechi feel _bad,_ but he laughed instead. Laughed himself out for good, almost. Maybe dying in the yard would be the trick.

"Do you have _anything_ to say for yourself."

Checklist of emotions the old man can feel, project strongly enough that Akechi can breathe them: (1) Exasperation. (2) Desperation. (3) Resignation, if Akechi has any sway at all, and

"Nope! Not a damn thing!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember how i said this was supposed to be a oneshot? the uneven chapter divisions are the direct result of creative decisions past. i am, as always, so sorry jkjkldsjkfds. if it's any consolation, my favorite chapter is the next one! [SEND IN THE CLOWNS]
> 
> anyway. ask me abt my canon compliant oc yagami @ spherekuriboh on tumblr lmao, he's the only man on the planet to consistently make worse decisions than akechi and i love him dearly in that bastard kind of way.


	5. TO QUIET THE DEAD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter the clowns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly? on reflection i should also have made akechi watch madoka.
> 
> this is my favorite chapter of the fic.

Akechi woke up with the same headache, which was new, and the feeling that his wrists were tied to something, which was older and more obnoxious. The carpet he's sitting on belongs to his apartment. The table he's tied to, monogrammed coasters covering the water rings on the surface, was also nominally his.

Home. Nominally. It must be the twenty-first.

He sat up to see Kitagawa leaning against his kitchen island, talking in low tones to Sakura, who perched on it with her dirty fucking feet where a normal person would prepare meals. The day that somebody respected the integrity of Akechi's paper kitchen would be the day the world ends. 

He smiled.

"[Hey you. You're finally awake.]"

At the voice, speaking incredibly stilted _English_ , Kitagawa and Sakura jumped. Between the headache and the restraints, it was a labor for Akechi to turn and see Joker splayed out all the way across his couch.

It was hard to see his eyes, but Joker sat up just a little to meet him halfway. "[You were trying to cross the border, right?]" The odd intonation got bolder, steadier as he kept going, "[Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there—]"

If he has a hick accent in Japanese, it’s way worse now, but Akechi didn’t get the chance to snipe about it. Something sailed through the air, smacked the back of the couch, and bounced what should have been harmlessly onto Joker’s chest. It wasn’t harmless— Akechi could tell by the way Joker’s face scrunched— and together, they threw looks back towards the kitchen, where Sakura was poised to fire off another one of whatever she was holding.

“[Damn you Stormcloaks!]” cried Joker, who has never once learned a lesson in his life. Sakura wasn't kind enough to miss him that time, her projectile of choice rebounding hard off of Joker's shoulder. "Ow!"

"Shit, sorry!"

In a Herculean labor, Joker sat up like a normal person, and then furthered it by lowering himself down to Akechi's level. Sitting next to him, like this, was very close. Joker smelled like antiseptic and bruises. Akechi watched.

"Take a picture."

"What?"

At this point, it was something of a miracle that Joker’s never chipped a tooth in that grin of his.

"Ugh. Shut up."

“Now that’s a rude thing to say to someone who’s about to untie you.”

Joker leaned over and pulled on one end of whatever they tied him to the table with— the whole bond fell apart like nothing, which allowed Akechi to scramble backwards from human proximity. Very, very human proximity. He really survives the whole damn thing, Joker, beaten to shit and halfway back. He’s in Akechi’s fucking apartment with the idiot crew and he’s got shoelaces in his hand. Shoelaces.

"Are you sure you don't want me tied up? I can kill you."

Shoelaces? Joker grinned away just the same. "You won't."

If Akechi was going to say something awful, Joker was saved from it by the fact that he suddenly recognized the laces to be from his own loafers. Killjoy Kitagawa probably already locked up all the real stuff, too, if he’d bothered to go that far in his life-preserving crusade. “How did you get in.”

"Broken lock. This is a nice place you've got," Joker said, only slightly muffled by the corner of… whatever that was that he was opening with his teeth, the yellow thing Sakura threw at him, "How are you affording this much square footage."

“On top of eating out every day?” Kitagawa’s disgusted eyes cast over the empty cupboards, catching only briefly on the one where Yagami keeps bottles.

“What, do you want an excuse?”

“No!” Sakura stood up, finally for once in her life tall, “I’ve seen your bed. I wanna be an idol.”

“Why were you _in my room._ ” No, he knew the answer to that the second he asked it. She was stealing his stuff, enlisting it all in emotional warfare, _again._ “Nevermind.”

“Makoto was right. It’s all wasted on you.”

Akechi decided he wasn’t much a fan of whirling around in this conversation, but he faced Joker anyway. “What is _it_.” 

Joker winced, but extended his arm alllll the way up. “A bed this tall? _Soft_? I wish that were me. Holy shit. I live in an attic, dude.”

“You live in a—” _clown car,_ Akechi was going to say, until Joker dropped his garbage wrapper on the floor. “Are you serious?”

“Why not? At this rate, you probably have the place cleaned.”

Oh. It had been an accident, which was only betrayed by the fact that Akechi has known Joker again and again and again and he wouldn’t be such a dick otherwise. Butterfingers, in a world that didn’t bend to cognition, but letting him go on it would disgrace them both. “So you’re _littering_ on my—” Wait. “God, what are you _eating_ —”

Something far slower than a bullet popped Akechi square in the chest. A… Kitkat bar, flying from the kitchen.

“Don’t be jealous, got you one too.” Sakura said, “Give praise.”

“ _Why._ ”

Not praise, but pause. “... I dunno, actually? Inari?”

“Your exact words included _last meal_ and _God_ but you were mumbling too quickly for me to take dictation. Apologies.” Kitagawa has never looked sorry a single day in his life. Sakura swatted him, which forced his attention to drift. “Be grateful, Akechi, the corn ones were supposed to be for you.”

_FUCKING WHAT?_

Joker shrugged into his fucking corn flavored candy bar. “What? ‘s good.”

 _Hick—_ “... Okay! Okay.”

Whether he wanted to know what other sorts of atrocities were happening in his apartment was a moot point, because the air was electric. He was going to hear about it.

“Inari _licks_ his.”

Akechi stood up slowly, from his undignified scrambling position. This was so stupid. This was by far the stupidest thing that’s ever happened to him, ever.

“How else are you supposed to _savor the flavor?!_ ”

“Hell yeah, Yusuke, fight the power. It’s not like Futaba can talk anyway, she bites hers on the s—”

No. No, no, God damn this all to Hell, _no_. “What do you want.”

Joker stopped, interrupted in the middle of his insult. He didn’t abort the hand gesture he’d been giving to the kitchen, or turn— he froze in the absolute. “What do I _want_?”

“Yes. What are you doing here. Why are you talking to me.”

The pretense, ever so briefly, became transparent on Joker’s face. He was angry.

“I was afraid you’d died, you stupid bastard!”

He was _stupid._ Was that all? Akechi returned to the corner of the table more than a little annoyed— Joker could have saved himself a trip and the trouble if he’d just called. “Don’t be dramatic.”

“ _DRAMATIC._ " That broke his self-imposed hold, and Joker brought his hand down slowly onto Akechi's neat coffee table. "You think _I'M_ dramatic!?"

"Boys!" Sakura appeared in their space, Kitagawa bearing the cardboard box right behind, "Shut up!"

" _HE_ thinks _I'M_ dramatic, Futaba. For worrying about him. When he's been—"

" _You faked your death!_ " Akechi paused. "I mean, right? That's right? Is this…” God, there's no other way to _say it_ , "... a pancakes run."

Ow. Ow ow ow. 

Joker pushed his hands through his hair. "You— a fucking _what?"_

"Pancakes, pancakes, did I, uh…" His hand turned in the air, who the Hell was he, Sakura? He shoved them into his lap. "When we first met, did I talk to your cat. Was your cat talking about pancakes."

Yusuke snorted. It must be right, then, because Joker knew and told all his friends that Akechi was a two-faced liar and also an idiot. He never got away on the pancakes thing, never lived it down.

"... You knew."

"I knew about your talking cat, yes." … After the first time, anyway, but he doesn't need to admit that now. "I honestly think every persona user in Shibuya knows about your talking cat. You think you're subtle?"

So this was pancakes. Okay. There were only so many ways it could go from there. The categories narrowed in Akechi's mind— something wasn’t quite right, but, whatever. Sakura crouched on the floor next to the table. "You knew it was all fake?"

She asked him casually, as if she were only curious. 

"I did."

"How?"

Kitagawa responded to her pawing at the air by setting the box down beside her. He then sat his ass on the reinforced quasi-bulletproof coffee table. 

"Get off!"

Akechi's request was answered with a glare. A scowl, even. "No."

"Hey, Goro, you wanna focus for a second?"

Sakura snapped her fingers, which seemed to snap Joker back into the conversation. 

"Sorry— did he give you _permission_ to call him by his given name?"

"I did not!"

"Yeah? Well I'm not calling him Akechi.” She dug in the box with both her hands, “It's fake."

"It's WHAT!"

Kitagawa hummed, still sitting on a table where people would presumably eat, have coffee, plot murders, do homework. "Do you not read the classics, Amamiya Ren?"

Freeze. Wait. Halt. Stop. "Kurusu Akira...?"

It took about a second of sudden eye contact for them to mutually establish that no, they were not fucking around, but by that time Akechi had already realized it was foolish question that shouldn't have been asked anyway. Joker is both, neither… multiplicity is the name of the game. They shouldn’t be surprised. They should have expected it, actually.

Even so, the man himself was suddenly caught very much in a lie.

If he’d have been capable of it, Joker would have bolted. If they’d cornered him in an apartment-shaped palace, he’d have elected for the kitchen window, just to get footprints on Akechi’s sink for fun. He knew this to be true, saw the shadows cleaning Niijima’s chandeliers on their slinks between saferooms. Joker ‘Call Me Joker, Seriously’, their dear leader, got a weird satisfaction out of making messes. Why would this have been different? Of course he would be the one to end the fakest of them all. It was almost funny— maybe that was how they’d gamed the Metaverse, technicalities on the death certificate? 

Sakura brooked no such speculation, just dug around in the box. “Now—”

Of course, Kitagawa interrupted. “Are we not addressing this?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Thank you, Futaba.” Joker smiled, cat that got into cream, until she said— 

“Shut up Komaeda. We’re moving on to the next question.”

“EXCUSE YOU?”

Akechi almost smiled at Joker's indignance, would have taken a picture of it for Makoto if his phone was anywhere he could get to it, but Kitagawa unfortunately was too thorough for that. Opportunity lost, he paid attention to Sakura again. “Goro, what did you mean when you said ‘pancakes run’. What other routes are there?”

Video game terminology, so early in the conversation. He wouldn’t be able to stand this for long, and they both knew what would happen at the end of this little dialogue anyway. “Just get on with it.”

“Skipping the cutsc—” Since she cut herself off, he must have been making some kind of face. Her eyebrows quirked neatly, perhaps to match. “Ready?”

He rolled his eyes, nodded once. He expected her to ask the question, _what am I going to do next_ , as if it was some kind of quiz game he could win without losing. Wrong. 

It didn’t take a second. She drew the gun and fired it at him, light and sound that hurt. 

Akechi stiffened, fell straight backwards to the ground like she wanted him to in this little play-dead— maybe too convincingly, at the peak of his headache. Joker yelled, and in the next nanosecond the telltale rush of latent madness in the air nearly overcame him with the sound of movement.

“OhshitohshitohshitI’msorry— “

“Yeah,” Akechi said, opening his eyes, “Now what.”

They were all standing over him, staring down in… unmistakable horror. “What the _fuck,_ ” Sakura ventured, gremlin-crouching so she could really get into his face. “Whatthefuckwhatthefuck.”

Did she vault the table? Jesus. “You’re crowding me.”

“CROWDING!” Joker threw his hands at the ceiling, “WE THOUGHT YOU DIED! AGAIN! FUTABA!? WE THOUGHT YOU’D DIED AGAIN JUST NOW—”

“What?”

Kitagawa lightly pulled Joker back from Akechi’s space before going back and retrieving Sakura too. With an equally detached air, he said, “Sit up out of that.”

The others were all standing now. That must have been directed to him, Akechi, but… He sat up, looked back at the gory stain on the carpet. He could feel it, suddenly, matting in his hair, down the side of his face and soaked into his shirt, as if he’d been leaking that out for hours. Sticky and wet. “Aha.”

This was a familiar spot on his floor, hunh, in front of the couch? Of course.

He expected the urge to make jokes about his deposit, the _cleaning service,_ or anything else. It was like he’d died again... If the old man were hanging out in the background, Akechi would have made them all, one after another in a comedian’s last ditch. No, though. The three of them, around his table, looked scared. No desire flickered in him at all, which meant he had to say something else.

“It’s fine?” He tried it, but it didn’t sound right. Akechi elected to watch Sakura, already settled back into her spot across from him, and not the painful maneuvering that sitting down again put Joker up to. “It’s fine.”

Better. 

“It is definitely,” Kitagawa suddenly disappeared when the going got tough, choosing to bang around in the kitchen instead, “Not fine.”

“Well, I’m not getting my deposit—”

Joker pinched the bridge of his nose, waving his other hand in front of him. “If that’s a joke I’m gonna need you to stop right there. I can’t handle jokes right now.”

Sakura hopped like a raven, redirecting her attention in full.

“Joker— You? Ban jokes? You greeted him with the _Skyrim copypasta._ You have no rights! None whatsoever!”

“Sorry, did RALOF have to deal with corpses hitting the ground? No! Leave me alone! Also, fuck off! I was... coping! Breaking the ice! Whatever!”

Oh, that sure was a series of words exchanged, that Akechi didn’t want to hear any details about, ever, at all, if he could help it. “Speaking of my deposit, did you say that you broke the lock to get in?”

“No.” Kitagawa returned, tossed at Akechi the couple of never-used-for-dishes dishtowels, only subtly stained with blood of Mementos disasters past. “The lock was broken when we got here.”

From the pocket of her hoodie (bright red but he can’t make out the text on it, she can’t always be wearing that, can she?) Sakura produced a note. It was slid across the table in Akechi’s general direction, hidden in the pool that her striped sleeve was making until she took her hand back.

_Hello Landlord,_

_You look nice today! Sorry for the breaking the lock, I seem to have_ — several things were scratched out, here— _lost my keys forever and Featherman was starting. If I’m not in when you see this, I’ve probably left on vacation with my cousins. Will return. Probably. Will probably return soon… ish. Yeah. Soonish._

_Love, Akeshi_

“Please tell me you didn’t think I wrote this.”

“Your name is misspelled,” Sakura pulled a can from the same place, kangaroo pouch. “Of course it was you throwing us off your scent.”

“Sak—”

“I’m kidding. Jeez. Wipe the stuff off your face, it’s really getting weird.”

He ignored her, in gory protest. _You look nice today!_ and Akechi’s Featherman-cousins. This must have been left, what, last time? Who was supposed to be here last time. “Sakamoto wrote this, didn’t he, Kitagawa.”

“Could you imagine? No, his handwriting is barbaric. I wrote it.” Before he could be reprimanded (and he was, _Inari!?_ and _Yusuke!?_ swung at him in succession) Kitagawa’s face clouded over. “No, wait. Wait, wait.”

Oh boy. Akechi looked down, noticed the can in Sakura’s hand, again— a Rlyeh. If she were to drink that entire thing, all hundred pounds of her would be bouncing off the walls for the next two days. He'd sworn off energy drinks (especially this one, chief devil among them) years ago but… magic is fucking real. Akechi held out his hand for it. Because she wasn’t paying attention, Sakura gave it to him. Nice. 

Her now empty hands whirled in the air. “Inari. When did you come here? When did you come here with Ryuji?”

“And Takamaki.” Akechi forgot to hold his breath before opening the can. Apparently Sakura prefers jet fuel over piss, but it’s all the same. It sucks. “The Get-Well Brigade.”

Or, the kidnappers, but there was no reason to make this even more complicated.

“ _And Ann!?”_

Akechi leaned back, to rescue the Kitkat he’d dropped from getting caught in the slow creep of the spreading ooze. “Mhm. She kn—” No, actually. She shouldn’t have known about his 'cousins'. He’d died that time, right at the end of that one. “Mhm.” 

He watched his own hands unwrap the snack, to avoid Joker's eyes on him. The wafers snapped easily apart, but even still, fragments of chocolate fell into his lap.

"What was that."

"Hm?"

Joker made a hand gesture, approximating nothing but nonsense. "You stopped."

"No, I was just thinking that she shouldn't have known that." It was forthcoming, and Joker seemed surprised at the sincerity of Akechi’s answer, but what was the point of being duplicitous now? There were precious few secrets left worth holding to his chest. "Did I mention that the world is ending?"

To avoid following himself up, Akechi took another pull of the energy drink. If he visualized hard enough, a health bar going up, he might not have to deal with bodily consequence anymore. That's how it works with coffee. That's how it works with the Metaverse.

Sakura steepled her hands. "Goro. I don't say this lightly. What the fuck are you talking about."

In response, Akechi swilled the can, which reminded her it existed. Sakura snatched it back from him, which was fine— that kind of thing makes him wired. Twitchy, plus, it had already solved his headache. Kitagawa, on her other side, plucked it from her hobbit hands.

“Hey!”

“No.”

She responded by producing another— that one piss, not jet fuel. Apparently, she's well-rounded in the art of ruination. Kitagawa went for it instantly, frowning. "Stop that."

“If we’re all going to die,” Joker quirked his lips faintly, “then it doesn’t matter much, does it?”

“ _JOKER._ ”

"No, no. He gets me." She snapped it open, drank an impressive half of it in one go. "Are we all going to die, Goro?"

"You, me, and the old man too. Cheers."

The room shuddered, or perhaps it was just the four of them at once. Akechi barely had the time to wonder if he’d imagined it, the stop and shake.

“Spouting... nonsensed words?” The smile faded from Joker’s face. “This isn’t a way to talk about it.”

Sakura picked back up, tapped her stupid nails against the side of the stupid can, “No, no. I remember this, right? The nosy guy, or something?” 

That was one way to say it. Akechi elected to ignore Joker’s weird choking sound. He put a hand to his throat, probably coughing on his awful choice in candy, poor thing. Sucks to suck. He tried to clear the hick accent bleeding in from his hick throat, from God knows where.

Kitagawa, meanwhile, moved to set the can he was holding on one of the monogrammed coasters. “I think some people call that a conscience. Why is everything you own emblazoned with an initial that isn’t even yours?”

Hunh. Now there was a question. It’s not like he bought this crap for himself— coasters? Why does he even have coasters at all. The urge to knock everything off the table rose ominously within him, but Akechi tamped it down with a false air of cool. “Branding. Also, very funny.”

“What.”

Joker gasped, but if he wasn’t going to contribute to the conversation, Akechi was going to ignore him. 

“The conscience thing. The old man is… real.”

Sakura tilted her drink at him. “You hesitated.”

“I did not!”

Suddenly, Joker lunged forward and knocked everything off the table. It wasn’t much, aside from the _fucking_ coasters and the little plastic murder weapon hitting the ground. Both Kitagawa and Sakura had the reflexes necessary to save Akechi’s carpet the trauma of spilled Rlyeh, thank God.

“What the hell—”

Whether Kitagawa was looking at Joker or the onetwothreefourfive bullet holes that were no longer strategically covered was unclear and irrelevant. Akechi raised his eyebrows, but by all appearances, Joker was finished losing it.

He was, instead, staring out through Akechi’s tiny kitchen window, and pointing. This was, somehow, not the stupidest thing to ever happen to Akechi. 

“Uh,” Sakura waved her hand gently in front of her brother's face, “Can I buy a vowel?”

Joker scowled and tossed one of the fallen coasters at her. Mysteriously, he had no additional shit to talk. This was bad. Or, well. It wasn’t a bad joke, for what it was, the _A_ sitting in her lap now, but it… wasn’t right, either. Unfamiliar. Sakura filled the uncomfortable silence. “Ha, ha.”

He made another noise, thumping his fingertips against his breastbone. Kitagawa rose quickly, slapped him on the back, because (Akechi realized this with an ominous clarity) Joker wasn’t breathing.

“Inari!”

Wrong. It isn’t Kitagawa’s fault, but he’s not helping. The air smelled like old paint that was distinctly blue, and magic is real. Of course magic’s still real. _This isn't the way to talk about this._

So they’d have to do it some other way. Fine. So be it. A problem for future them.

Now, though... Akechi cast his eyes around his sparse living room before they alighted again on Sakura’s obnoxious sweatshirt. When she wasn’t bent over with sweater paws, he could see that it proclaimed her an ‘Elf-Made Man’— when there was still more than a month to go? Shameful, Christ, but it would do. 

“Joker. Do you believe in Santa Claus?”

Joker coughed in his surprise, let out the air that got trapped inside him by the magic around his throat. “I— I’m, what?” He shook his hair out, and it fell into his face… drenched in sweat. “No?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

That was an answer, and not a test of the voice. Akechi knew Joker was watching him carefully, even if he couldn’t quite see it.

“I think that’s stupid. I’ve seen you summon Satan.”

Sakura snorted, but Kitagawa pushed shoulder gently. If he caught Akechi’s eye for just a moment, he couldn’t tell. “No, no, for once I think Akechi might be on to something.”

 _For once,_ but Akechi smiled instead. 

“Are you implying,” Sakura asked, turning to stare Kitagawa in the face, “that Santa lives in Hell.”

“Perhaps…? You’re the Catholic one. Was he not a saint or something?”

“ARE Y— Are you implying that saints just, go to Hell? Straight up?”

Sakura looked to Joker for help, but he was holding back a laugh, so she gave up immediately and tried Akechi instead.

“You’re Catholic?” he asked her. 

“... Yeah, I guess? Got a problem, Goro?”

Three’s a club. “Not particularly.”

“ _I_ have a problem.” (It’s Kitagawa, of course he does.) “Would he not be in hell anyway. Does he not devour the naughty children.”

The harsh laugh escaped Joker at last, left him bracing against the table. “That’s Krampus!”

“And that settles nothing! Is Krampus a suitable persona? Are Krampus and Santa natural enemies? Does the multiplicity of the devil apply to the fat men and the fat men that eat naughty children.”

“What is it," Sakura asked, pushing hands through her hair, "with you and eating kids today?”

“We didn’t have dinner.”

“Gross. That’s gross, Yusuke.” Joker tapped his fingertips on the tabletop, ominously close to the glass residue, “Also, I think Krampus is an all-Santa fusion, if I had to, I guess, guess.”

He nodded to himself, satisfied with the assertion, but that didn't address Akechi's most important issue. 

“What in _Hell_ is a Krampus.”

Sakura, not giving a damn about his intellectual pursuits. “See, I don’t think Krampus lives in Hell!”

"Why would he _not—"_

Akechi pinched the bridge of his nose. Without checking his pockets, he said, “Where’s my phone?”

“ —live in _hell,_ and Google is cheating, _Akechi_.”

Kitagawa, married to a lie until the last. Then again, Akechi himself prefers it that way.

“I’m not Googling your stupid demon. I need it for something else.”

Joker scoffed. “What, and you think we took it?”

“Of course. Can I have it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

This was a stupid question to ask for a reason Akechi was sure he'd hear

“If you wanted me to be helpful,” he said, “you shouldn’t have disappeared for a week, and then _texted me out of the blue._ ”

“What do you mean.”

“Whatever you said, _see you soon_ —”

“No.”

Joker leaned over, one hand pointing at Sakura to shut whatever she was about to say up. "Then what the hell do you mean, what do I mean?" He asked Akechi right back, quirking an eyebrow like it wasn't important. "Seven days, a hundred and sixty eight hours, you know. A week."

Oh, shit. “What day is today.”

Shit, shit, shit.

“November 28th?” Kitagawa slipped his— no, _Akechi’s_ phone out of his pocket to check, “Wait, it’s early on November 29th.”

No way. An entire week, oh, _shit._ “Sakura. How does your bug work. What did you do to the one that was already there.”

“Hunh? Did you kn—” (The distressed sound he made confirmed that, yes, he knew that too, and so she continued before Akechi started tearing his hair out too,) “I didn’t delete it. It just filters the information that gets sent across in such a way that—”

“Can you do it in ten words.” Akechi stood, started turning lights off. Fuck. Shit.

“It fakes texts but shows other things, like… Oh.” She tapped her teeth with her knuckles. “I get it.”

Kitagawa, making himself useful, went into the kitchen. Apparently he put Akechi’s gun in the fridge, next to his knives, next to— hey, where did he find the caltrops? “Please don’t tell me we’ve been in danger this whole time.”

But she lives to disappoint.

“Location data's real."

Kitagawa took about half a second to process that, and fortunately Akechi had the wherewithal to catch his phone when it was thrown at him. Good. If it went off the radar before they got out, that would be worse. They need to ditch it before Shido realizes it’s here again—

“Hey. Did you hear that.” 

Joker whispered it right before the elevator dinged, and Yagami Ren’s voice filled the hallway. 

_“-- I know that. I just don’t think he’d turn up like this, y’know.”_

Like what, a sitting duck? Akechi’s done stupider. His front door, for example, was hanging open. He could see from here the number Sakamoto did on his doorknob, and if it could even dream of holding itself closed, that would be impressive. Yagami paced in front of the elevator at the end of the hallway.

 _“Boss, c’mon. I’m sure he had a— Yeah, alright. Yeah. I know._ ”

In his mind Akechi could imagine the fit that Shido was working himself into, foam at the mouth and everything. This was bad. This would be worse than Akechi’s shoulders simply losing track of his head.

_“I hear ya.”_

Akechi turned to look at the others and found Joker pale. “We need to leave, now.” Nobody moved. Akechi tried again. “Joker.”

“That’s an assassin.”

“The cleaning service,” Akechi muttered, maybe a tinge rueful, “Sorry about that.”

“Hey. Can I die without you being responsible like, once?”

“Ask myself that every day. Did you say it was the 29th?”

“Sure.”

“What are you two talking ab— HEY!”

Kitagawa didn’t like Akechi hauling him by the sleeve, but he’d have to deal with it. They needed to be close together for this to work— Mementos is a place for train-riders only, and they couldn't even dream of making it to the platform as it stands. Yagami was already running out of ways to stall, slowly approaching Akechi’s broken door, but approaching nonetheless. 

He wears white. It’ll be easy enough to duck him where they’re going, the only place Shido’s color-coded staff actually served a purpose— God! Every time, his life sucks a little bit harder. Akechi pulled Kitagawa into his bedroom. This would probably work, since Sakura and Joker followed on their heels.

“Goro?”

Akechi didn’t look at Joker. Akechi didn’t look at anything. If it was the 29th of November, there was only one way out, one palace left. Hopefully his roommate isn’t home. In a single breath, he said, “Shido Masayoshi, The Diet Building, the most expensive yacht you can imagine.”

Finished, he spiked his phone onto his bedside table. Before it shattered, they were gone.

***

It was on spawning that Akechi realized what had been bothering him the whole time. “Is it really November 29th?”

“For fuck’s sake, yes!”

Kitagawa rounded, looked pissed. The light of rebellion or however they claim their ties to magic flashed in his eyes. Akechi failed to blink.

“Then why are two of you dressed for the beach?”

Shido hadn’t been expecting them, so they were still in whatever they were wearing before— a tiremarked sweatervest, a Christmas sweater somehow even worse than that, and two pairs of swim trunks among them.

"Oh," Kitagawa said, hands in his light sweater's pockets, "Hunh."

"Aw, is it cause you were you imagining me in my underwear? Gowo, I didn't know I intimidated you that much."

" _You_ showed up like that."

"W— well! Well—"

Sakura pushed him gently, "Quit it. Where are we?"

The lights were off, but they ended up clustered together where Akechi always ends up when he fantasizes harder than usual about burning his father's ego to the ground— the boat. The stupidity of the metaphor never failed to amaze him. A _boat._ Imagine.

"Servant's quarters," he muttered, if only to answer Sakura. She didn't need to know, but he specified anyway, "My room." 

Not _our_ room, because it was thankfully empty of cognitions. It wouldn’t matter, if they got out quick enough… And God if there weren’t a thousand reasons to bolt, though. Tiny. Holes in the walls. A portrait of Shido hanging perfectly straight on the w— "Okay we need to go, now."

"What, why?" Joker picked at his open shirt, a thin buttondown which decidedly wasn't his second skin of 20 thief layers, "They don't know yet."

 _They_ , the shadows, or whatever. The portrait of Shido was hanging straight on the wall, and not crooked how Akechi always leaves it on his brief visits, which means... "Doesn't matter. Where's my phone."

"You shattered it, dumbass." Sakura spun around, looking, perhaps, for the rest of the very small room. "Why are there two beds here?"

Fuck. "Doesn't _matter,_ where's _your_ phone?"

"It does matter, if you're going to insist so hard it doesn't." Kitagawa sat on the unmade bed, presuming (correctly) that it was his. Sakura took two long steps to perch next to him, feet on the sheets. "We need so many answers from you that it's becoming difficult to keep track of the questions."

Joker elected to stand where he started, which left Akechi in the whirling middle again. "No. I'm not doing this here."

"You weren't doing it out there, either."

"Excuse me for having some difficulties."

"Your head exploded and we don't know why."

"And you started choking on important information. Like I said, difficulties. Look, we really can't—"

Too late, the heavy door to the room fell open. The woman standing in it looked about how Akechi had come to expect, in his brief glimpses of her— shorter than he remembered, twice as tired, and wearing that fucking maid outfit. Sakura whistled to the best of her ability, not very well at all, but it caught the woman's attention well enough. Her head snapped up, the door slammed behind her, and the lights snapped on— For a second, it seemed like it might be the fight Kitagawa was expecting when he dropped the temperature ten degrees, but... no.

"Oh! Go-chan!" A smile spread across his mother's face, dropping just as fast at the sight of blood, "Did you lose a fight? Let me see!"

In a second she crossed the room, improbably tall heels clacking against the cheap flooring. 

"It's fine."

"It is not fine! Look at you—" Her eyes bounced to the others, in search of support, the moment before she realized there were others _there._ Just as quickly, she appraised them. "Oh! Did you bring home friends?"

("Home..." 

"Friends...?"

" _Go-chan!?_ ")

Cognition is king in the Metaverse. If he ignores them hard enough, maybe they will go away.

"... Yes, I did. Keep them a secret?"

The facsimile of Okita Ayumi winked at him. She looked so tired. "Between us."

"Okay. Thank you. Bye."

She fussed over him, looked for the wound on his head, apparently didn't find anything in Akechi's stupid mop but sourceless blood. He knew her well enough, by the glint in her eye, that she now assumes the blood is someone else's.

Perhaps she's right.

A heavy silence settled over the room, before his mother decided to break it. "You always leave so soon! I don’t think we’ve talked in a year, and you’re not even going to introduce me?"

She was mocking him, but it was working.

"They can…" _introduce themselves,_ Akechi was going to say. No. That sounded like a genuinely awful idea. 

"Fox," Piped up Kitagawa, with as small a hand-wave as he could manage. He made his living on capturing the passions— if he was stilted in movement, it was because he was holding something else in until he could find a canvas. Akechi would probably hear a lot about this little encounter later. How shitty, that one of them has a cognitive mother.

"Navi!" Sakura greeted her with a hollow smile. How shitty it was that _Akechi_ had a cognitive mother, though if he tried, Wakaba might be rattling around somewhere, too.

He doesn’t try.

"Joker." Joker didn't do much at all. "And you?"

"What a dear, doting son, to never mention his mother to his friends!" She laughed, a loud genuine thing, and grabbed Akechi over the shoulders. Aggressively he didn't take notice of the exchange of glances between the members of the orphan club, "Please, call me Ayumi."

"Ah— it's nice to meet you."

Joker was obviously attempting to determine whether that was a given or a family name. He'd be disappointed to see it written and find it a dead end, but he wasn't the star of this conversation, for once. Joker didn't matter. 

"And what should I call you?" Okita Ayumi asked him, Akechi. "Are you still my little White Robin when you're with your friends?"

 _Her little White Robin._ God, he must have been four years old when they made that up, and wasn't it a punch in the gut to hear. Kitagawa laughed, disguised it elegantly as a cough into his sleeve, but that's not the problem."No… I'm Crow, this time. One word titles."

They’d already been here too long, humoring a dead woman in a dangerous place, but that wasn’t the only problem anymore. Shido shouldn't have known that. Akechi balanced lightly on a very sharp edge, at the very top of a very steep slope, there should have been no way for Shido to know that.

But, this woman knew it. "Oh, I thought I taught you better! There are at least five more striking corvids— Where is the art, Goro? The art!"

Her teasing fell favorably on the group that wasn't experiencing the latest and greatest in secondhand existential crises. Or, so Goro assumed. What _must_ the others be thinking, seeing her here like this ( _like this,_ in a weird fetish outfit from a nightmare) standing directly next to him? That they have the same face? They don’t— it was just happenstance, Shido’s stupid color system, that mentally filed them both together in the filth.

… He remembered her hair shorter, too, chopped off at the ends in fun fits of pique, but whatever. The braid only suited to differentiate them further. Did she always wear it like that, before?

“I guess,” his mother said to the group, “You all should call me Gold instead, hm?”

A one-word title, but, “That’s the wrong half.”

“Sorry? What was that?”

She grinned wickedly at him. Of course she was joking, memorychecking him for their little game in full. She knows it all. Of course, and Akechi can’t even ask his friends for sympathy. Not that he had to! Or needed it!

How did Shido know about White Robin and Gold Canary…?

Before she could further terrorize him, her pager went off. The ship quasi-existed as it did— nothing but blackjack and hookers, fore to aft / port to starboard, and not even mentally would Shido spring for company cellphones. Again, the thing rang, filled Akechi with ice.

“Work,” she said, simply, “You can host from here?”

“Yeah.”

A clock was ticking. A clock had been ticking since she walked in here, saw them, but a clock was ticking loudly now, inside Akechi's head.

“If your d—” She glanced over, but only Akechi could possibly know about the _dad_ caught in her subtle teeth, “ _our_ , dear, dearly beloved boss,finds out, we’re both in trouble. Don’t be foolish, okay?”

“Okay.”

He held his breath, but his mother kept beaming. “Alright, I’m off. Love you, bye!”

“Bye. Love you.”

She made it three steps towards the door before, again, the beeping filled the room. Akechi shut his eyes, but he still heard Sakura yelp when the pager impacted against something. _Fuck._

“DAMN!”

He didn’t need to be looking to know that his mother’s fist went through a wall, another jagged hole to match the others. Akechi did jump when Joker touched his shoulder, but it wasn’t anything— just him getting closer. 

“Did something… happen?” Joker asked Okita Ayumi. She ignored him. An effective cognition, sure. Hardwired to love her son, but not to answer to anybody else.

“You’re on your way,” is what she said, to her son, whom she loved.

“Already?” He’d known that it could happen. Even if he never spoke to her, this wasn’t the first time he’d stayed too long. “To the deck?”

“No. A… home visit, apparently.”

The distaste in her voice...

“I’m not allowed to come in here!” Akechi felt the panic rise in his chest, looked to Joker and the pair on his bed, as if they’d know. They stared back at him, bewildered, probably horrified again. There’s still blood on his face, he must look fucking haunted. “This room is supposed to be safe!”

That’s why they’re called _saferooms!_

His mother shook out her hand without blinking, dots of blood on her uniform. “Maybe the boss is mad.” Tick tock, tick tock. “You know _he’s_ too much of a pussy to kill me to my face.”

That’s just Shido, isn’t it. A coward of a delegator, even at the heart of it all. “Not like me.”

“Not like you at all.” She walked back over to him, kissed him on the bloody forehead. “Love you.”

The way she angled her body wasn’t subtle, blocking him from the other end of the room. The door must already be open. _He_ always opens the door, some kind of idiot mindgame, to let his targets know that death was on the other side.

Always on the other side. Never in this room.

The first time he’d found her at the restaurant Akechi had seen past her to catch those glowing eyes in the kitchen. They tore into him, left the neat ringmark of perfect idol teeth in his soul. She'd gotten between them then, too, and never again after that had Akechi stayed his mother’s welcome. It would be foolish to think that might save her the grief of dying, spawning again as another dime-a-dozen cognition in a world where money meant nothing.

Still. In his entire life he might have learned a single lesson. 

Even still, the hand on Akechi’s shoulder found a glove, fast in a whiff of freezing wind. “Navi,” Joker said, as if he’d had to warn her.

Akechi looked down. Fox, Joker, Navi, and Goro stood in a room. Only three of them were threats, in the eyes Akechi could feel on him already. His mother held the lie of her smile to the last. He was taller than her, which was the problem. “I’m here, aren’t I.”

A useless question. Could the others smell the cloying licorice haze that his real magic has? No. They'd gag, choke on it for sure. So it was up to him. Akechi met his own eyes at the door. They were yellow, but they were his, and he was held harsh in the jaws of something very large. 

Ayumi cleared her throat. “... I think you kids should get where you’re going. Now."

Akechi was going to be sick.

“It was nice meeting you,” Kitagawa said, as if he'd just learned how to talk, possibly tight with the simple regret that his first words were goodbye.

Akechi’s mom nodded solemnly, granting them permission to lunge for the bed— or, Joker lunged, pulling Akechi along by an iron grip on his shoulder.

The movement, of course, signalled the attack. The eyes in the doorway glowed, widened, were bright enough that Akechi could see the bared teeth under them. Was this the last thing that shadows saw from Black Mask? 

The teeth parted. The command might have issued, ragged _Laevatein!_ torn up by its harrowing escape from awful mouth, awful mind. Disgusting. 

Air fell out of Akechi as him and Joker tumbled into the others, into the bed. The stickysmell of licorice was overwhelming, disgusting. They barely had time at all before bullets sprayed— bullets, real gun bullets, that was three turns in one go, God damn this cheating cognition— 

***

“Did we make it?”

“Accounted for.”

“Yep.”

“Where’s—” They’d tumbled back out in front of the Diet Building. They must have, because all Akechi could see through the blood were the leaves above him, filtering the sun. Until Joker leaned in his way, anyway. “Oh, _fuck_.”

His head pounded, which wasn’t helped by the fact Joker was dripping something on him. Blood? Unsanitary. “Hn.”

“He got you...”

Thank you, Sherlock.

At this point, he hadn’t expected Joker to sound so distressed about it. Whatever. Akechi had taken the fatal hit again, and it was getting cold, the sun was out in the middle of the fucking night, but whatever. “The world might end.”

Oh, he regretted saying that. The words rattled a cough out of him, _ow._

It got slightly warmer because, apparently, Joker thought dying on the grass was too good for Akechi. What fun this would be to tell the old man, that he finally died in someone’s arms and it sucked because it just hurt. Was it fun, being the old man? Could it possibly be worse than this? Joker said something, but Akechi wasn't paying attention. 

Who was here. Kitagawa, Sakura, Joker. Useless, all of them— Joker fuses away healers like nothing, makes Makoto take care of it. Ha. Bet he'll learn from this one.

"Akechi."

Not this time. "Okita."

The moment wobbled.

"Goro."

" _What._ "

If Joker could quit dripping, it would be easier to focus. Why was he bleeding, if Akechi was the one who got stickywet. Was he really that much of a drama queen?

"Why do you keep doing this?"

He sounded exactly like the old man, which Akechi might have told him, if Joker hadn't been crying over his corpse.

***

“Oh, good, you’re finally awake.”

Akechi didn’t open his eyes. For the old man? Impressions were a new low. In front of him, the muted sound of a smack happened. “Idiot, that’s not how it goes.”

“I think it is. I’m pretty sure.”

When it was clear that _they_ — two hands laid upon him became three— were trying to move him, Akechi sprung to his feet… Or, he would have. They were chained, his hands were chained, in a tangle of chains he fell back to the ground.

“Oof!” said Joker.

“Ouch!” said Joker.

Two of them. At last, Akechi had found his way to Hell.

“What’s with the face?” The Joker that asked had his head tilted back, looked all the way down his nose at Akechi in the… dirt…?

“What’s with _your_ face?”

A bad question to ask. That Joker looked down suddenly, and from somewhere under the mop of hair— 

“UGH!”

Akechi tried to scramble away, but he was wrapped up in the warm chains, tied to the drip.

“Yeah.” Joker flipped his head all the way back again, with attitude. Akechi excused the insult, since anything else would involve muck spilling out of the hole in his forehead again… instead of out the back? Disgusting splatter. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. “Uh-hunh. Thanks for that one, by the way. Really. Appreciate it, beautiful.”

Akechi briefly considered his own appearance before deciding to not answer back at that one, actually.

“Don’t be a bitch,” said the other Joker, rolling his shoulder. He was shifting, the other Joker, back and forth. It didn’t look right, for a reason Akechi couldn’t quite peg, “C’mon.”

“I’m not being a bitch. I’m _incapable_ of being the bitch in this situation.” As if to prove the point, he passed his hands over his face, flicking the blood-and-other-things off with malice. “Why aren’t _you_ being a bitch.”

The chains didn’t rattle when they moved. Akechi watched them intently, tied to the Jokers’ wrists, tried not to feel them pulse instead.

“Three, are you gonna help him up, or what?”

“What if I say _or what,_ Glass-Bones-And-Paper-Skin.”

“That’s not my name.”

The shifty one that had been insulted didn’t look like any Joker that Akechi had seen off— not like the other one, anyway. There was no hole in the nicer Joker’s head, but still, something was off about him.

Three spat. Akechi knew it was… what. Performative? “Idiot. We don’t have names anymore.”

“Yeah we d—”

“Those don’t count. Do I look like a Three of Swords to you? No. No the fuck I do not. _You_ might be a Nine of Fuckups—”

“ _CUPS._ "

“— But me? No.”

“You are such a bitch.” Unguarded. That was what was wrong with the shifting Joker. “Come on.”

That was directed to Akechi, and with an odd shamble Nine got close. 

Three cleared his throat. “You’re going to embarrass yourself.”

“How about you shut up.” 

Akechi watched him carefully set his feet, take a deep breath before offering Akechi his hand. He hesitantly accepted, which was probably for the best— That Joker couldn’t support his weight. Akechi saw himself cause an unnatural drop of Nine's shoulder and screamed. It was embarrassing, but that’s what you do when you realized you can see bones moving under people’s clothing. The chains writhed as if they could also see it, were also screaming. Gross. Gross. Akechi fell back down, with purpose.

“I told you so,” said Three.

Tears rolled down Nine’s face, which undermined the nonplussed look he gave his counterpart.

“I knew you couldn't, but, fuck it. You know what.” Quickly, and with no mercy, Three grabbed at Akechi. Unfortunately, Akechi got cleaved right about there once, and hissed at him. “Jeez. Fine. Picky.” 

He moved his grip, hauled Akechi up by the lapels. His vehemence nearly cost him as Akechi (poor, tangled-up Akechi in another pulse of panic) nearly overbalanced and fell forward into him— very unproficient, overall, for any Joker Akechi could claim to know, and Three knew it too. “Wipe that look off your face.”

Akechi failed to do so. Without changing his expression, either, Nine reached forward and tugged on the chain. The odd slithering hiss of them returning to untangled order almost covered the ugly popcrack sound of body. 

Akechi winced. Nine, apparently, noticed.

“Parkour accident, don’t worry about it.”

“Uh.”

“You heard the liar. Don’t.” Three shoved him in the back. “Worry about it.”

Akechi realized he was in the middle, tied up between them. Unfavorable. Hellish, even. The chains if they were even chains were touching too much of his skin. “No, you never get used to them,” Nine said, idly scratching at the back of his neck. “Never.”

“Yeah. This sucks. And it sucks forever. For all of us. We’re stuck here, thanks to you.”

Three shoved at him again, and Akechi took the cue to start walking. They were forced to accommodate Nine’s pained gait, shuffling on a path that—

“Where are we going,” Akechi asked suddenly.

“Fuck if we know.”

“We don’t… get out much.”

“Out from _where._ ”

Three stopped so shortly Akechi nearly shoulderchecked him. “Are you stupid or something? Obviously. Look _around._ Look _back._ ”

Akechi didn’t have a choice, since Three spun him around himself. Looming was a prison. It was… ugly. Disgusting. Dreadful. 

“Yeah, see it now? We live there. Or, die there. Whatever! Souls trapped for all time.” 

Akechi wanted desperately to stop looking, but the building wouldn’t let him go.

“Thanks. You did that.”

It hurt to look at. Unwillingly, his eyes watered.

“What,” Three said, “Do you have it in you to cry _now—_ "

“Quit it.” A hand broke Akechi’s line of sight. He blinked, finally, as Nine turned his back again on it all. “You’re bitter.”

“ _YOU’RE D—_ ” Three froze, reoriented himself, started walking so fast Akechi nearly tripped again. “You’re damn right. Bitter. Every time he fucks up the cell gets a little fuller, _bitter._ He thinks we’re all the same.”

“We’re all Joker, what’s t—”

“If you ask me what the difference is I will dislocate your _tongue_ , you _know_ what the difference between you and me is.”

Nine scoffed, in that familiar way. “About seven months and a stick up the ass?”

Three spun, actually shoved Akechi to the ground to get at Nine. “Sorry I _CARE_ that we got murdered.”

“ _You_ got murdered, you unlikable son of a bitch.”

“And, what, you WALTZED out a window? Fuck you.” Three saw Akechi halfway to standing back up and yanked him the rest of the way by the hair this time, wiped his twice-bloodied hands down Akechi’s shirt like he'd been invited to do it. “This is hellish. This is hell.”

Despite himself, Akechi smiled. “If this is Hell, where’s Krampus.”

Nine laughed. It was harsh, loud. Maybe that’s just what Joker sounds like when he laughs for real. Akechi didn’t get the opportunity to question it, as Three took off walking again, muttering something offensive about Akechi’s shitty jokes.

“Shut up,” Nine called from the back, “You know you like them.”

“I’d literally wipe him off the face of existence if the chance was mine.”

Oh, God, who does this guy even talk to, _if the chance was mine_. Jesus Christ. “I’m sorry, are you some drowned Victorian child?”

Akechi regretted the joke, but not quite the second it left his mouth, because Three said, “Better than a drowned _rat,”_ and Akechi has known Joker long enough to tell when he’s smiling.

“Oh? How so?”

Wrong to press the point. Three hunched his shoulders, put on guard by one thing or another or all of it together. “One of us has morals.”

It was the fairest thing he’d said yet, but it probably stung the worst. Akechi affected apathy, politeness, a TV tone. “You know,” he said, “I never thought I’d end up in prison.”

“Oh,” said Nine, “You won’t.”

“Hunh?”

“We’re walking around it. Didn’t you notice?”

Hesitantly, Akechi glanced at their feet. Sure enough, their path curved away from the oppressive force of the building, and he nearly let out a sigh of relief.

“Yeah. They’d have torn you to shreds in there. Or, I would have.” Three yanked fingers through his hair, flicked viscera off his hand. "Stupid bastard won't even summon a persona. Imagine. You could have made it this time."

"Were you _watching_?"

Surprised, Akechi directed his question to Nine instead of Three, but Three turned around to answer. "Ace is the only channel our TV gets, so we get to see you fuck him up every single time. Like when you didn't summon a persona to avoid being mincemeat."

"Ace is… the Joker that's currently alive," Nine supplied, "It's kind of disturbing, honestly? He's us."

"No he—"

"I am thou, thou art I, we go through this every time, _please_ shut your mouth."

Three scoffed, turned forward on the long path again. It was… purple-ish, under their feet. They were getting closer to something Akechi got the feeling he didn't want to see.

If these were Jokers. Aspects of Joker. Whatever. And they'd had their eyes on the source, then that means they'd never seen...

"Hey," said Nine, in the thin silence, "Who killed you?"

— Loki. They don't know. "Does it matter?"

"It wasn't me, so, a little." 

" _Three._ "

"Yeah? What's up?"

Akechi shook himself, just for a second, before this could get all kinds of out of hand. "Hey, if you all are here, then where am I?"

"Here, smartass."

"... All of me?"

"Oh," Nine's face fell, Akechi didn't need to be looking to tell, "It's… hard? To talk about."

"You can ask the Warden when we get there." Three cleared his throat, coughed. "Let's move."

Contrary to the instruction he literally just received, Nine stopped walking. "We're taking him to the Wa-rden!?"

That didn't sound pleasant at all. "What? What does that mean, who's the Warden?"

Three ignored Akechi, leaned around him to talk. "Unless _you_ signed us up for the Get-Along Chain Gang, this shit," he shook his bound wrists, "is from on high."

"And you're just fine with that? YOU'RE the one who's like, oh, _I'm an individual, human rights_ , and what?"

"Who is the Warden?"

"Shut up! I don't know what you were expecting."

"Not the Warden!"

"What are we supposed to do, anyway, Nine? Run?" Three laughed, the smooth chuckle Akechi knew, before he started walking cautiously backwards. Like this, his dark eyes didn't leave his dark eyes, the conversation continued. "I don't think you've got any breaks left to make, buddy."

Akechi stood still for as long as he could, but resisting the pulling writhe was impossible. He caught up with the program silently. 

Nine resisted.

"So you're letting yourself be ordered around like an animal in chains because it _might_ let something bad happen to Akechi? Holy shit. Who even are you?"

"You must be stupider than I thought. Who else would put us in the shitty flesh-chains and give us the shitty job of walking the shittiest person we know to fuck knows where?"

Akechi looked around Three the same way Three looked around him, but the heavy haze made it hard to see forward.

"... I don't know!"

"You don't know."

"I don't! But there m—"

" _But there must be a way out_ , yeah, no. We can't even talk about him. The hands are already around our throats. Wake up."

In Akechi's periphery, it’s almost like Three was begging to be proven wrong. That was unfortunate. Hard to look at. Akechi looked down instead. The purple, he noticed, slowly gave way to something else. 

“I know where we're going," Akechi said, suddenly.

"No you fuckin' don't."

"We're going to the yard," Akechi said, suddenly walking faster, "The old man can help us."

"The _old man!?_ " cried Nine breathlessly from behind them.

“Yeah!” Akechi took the lead, feeling the dust under his feet grow bluer as if there was any feeling to the concept at all. He'd run, make them run. “Come o—”

His enthusiasm was cut short by a yank on the restraints. Akechi was forced to whirl, see Three with the chains wrapped around his hands. He’d forgotten Nine, who stumbled towards comfortable distance, panting.

"What do you know about the Warden, Akechi."

Three’s tone was low, dangerous. His fists were still up. If he still had the capacity, Akechi might have been afraid. "I don't."

"You just said you did!"

"Do you!" Nine wheezed it out, Akechi felt a stab of guilt at leaving him as behind as he could possibly have done, "Or don't you!"

Accusatory. That sounded like an accusation, desperate, prove-me-wrong.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. _I’m_ talking about the old man at the gallows.”

For the first time, the Jokers in front of him spoke in sync. 

“Gallows…?” They turned, as if to question each other, but with the simple glance found each other wanting. “What gallows?”

Oh God _damn it._

"You've been here this whole time and you've never seen the old man?"

Three lowered his hands, slowly cutting Akechi slack. That was a no, if he could read Joker at all, curious but too proud to ask. A rhetorical victory if Akechi had ever won one.

"Hey," Nine said, "I'm not down for gallows…"

That one was threatened, trying badly to play it off. Akechi was struck with poison nostalgia, Arsene's lapels clutched in his hands— dying seven months early— _ruined that boy's life for fun, just to see how it felt_ — Akechi smiled past the ice in his throat. "Don't you trust me this time?"

 _This time_ , how underhanded. The guilt hit home, clear in the unguarded eyes that never even got a chance to damn him, unless you count all the times he's fucked up between then and now. 

As the old man would say, he has to take responsibility someday.

“It’s not that I don’t…” Nine ran hands through his hair, Akechi avoided looking too closely, “But what if... something bad happens.”

“Aren’t you dead?”

“To you, I mean.”

“Aren’t _I_ dead?”

Three affected apathy, cut in anyway. “We know what our deal is,” he said, just barely tilting his head to one side, “But you’re the only you that we know of. Why you get to be you and I have to be us is beyond me."

"I'm sorry?"

"Yeah, you'd better be. I'm falling to pieces out here, and you're still Akechi."

"If something bad happens to you…" Nine trailed off into undisguised worry.

"A lot of bad things happen to me, it’s fine."

"If you're gonna be a smartass about it, then I _hope_ the world ends."

"No he doesn't."

"Yes I do, what the hell!"

“No, we don’t!”

Akechi turned around quietly, took cautious steps forward, and the bickering pair followed him. Whether they were humoring him or genuinely curious was irrelevant. Either way, it was something to do, and so they walked. If he tuned them out halfway, it was just like being in Mementos. The still air complained as it parted for them, whistled insults at their backs until it was blue in the face.

***

This would be the yard Akechi knew, if it wasn’t full. Jokers stood around. More Jokers than Akechi thought he knew, more than he wanted to count. They turned to look as one when the restraints hit the ground like some great dead thing, stirring up a cloud of dusty soul.

The gallows were empty.

 _Go!_ some of them said, framed un-neatly by swears and cries from the rest. _Go!_

Hands were laid against Akechi— Three, an iron grip on his shoulder, squinting into the distance. It occurred at last that this might be a trap.

"Watch out!"

Nine tried to catch Akechi when Three threw him out of the way, but they tumbled into a useless heap on the ground, and the thick rope that had shot at them so suddenly didn't care for the trick anyway. It curved with purpose, noosed around Akechi's odd neck out as if it belonged there.

Magic is real and inconvenient as Hell.

Akechi didn't need to see the other end of it, he knew it was wrapped around the crossbar as well as he knew his own name. He wrapped his hands around like he'd seen done before, felt it cut against his palms like new rope does. Where had his gloves gone? It didn't matter. He gripped it tight, so deeply that his knuckles pressed against his neck. 

Nine didn't manage to get a grip on him, but even if he had, it wouldn't have mattered. The rope pulled, dragging Akechi away from the Jokers and pulling his heels through the full grass until he arrived where he belonged. From his gentle balance on the scaffold he could see them all again, and, also, what the standing backs of the crowd had been hiding.

The old man sitting at the writing desk showed all his teeth when he smiled. "Behold!" 

He was speaking to the Jokers, over their murmur. They were too busy to behold Akechi from anything but corners of blownwide eyes. For a thief, his poker face was collective garbage.

"I _said._ " 

The old man snapped gloved fingers. In Akechi's periphery, two very short people appeared. Their approach to the front edge of the scaffold was hesitant— not because they were blindfolded, their steps were too sure to be afraid of falling. With a sickening drop of his stomach, Akechi realized they were short because they were maybe eight years old.

Again, they were snapped at. One turned towards the other, as if she could see her, and the other nodded, as if she could tell. Quickly behind their backs Akechi watched the one with the braid win rock-paper-scissors, and just as fast the other one flicked her wrist. The baton she was holding uncollapsed.

They smell like magic, like this place, but what she was holding in her hand was a taser. It crackled, demanding attention like it demanded every speck of the lowlight in the yard.

" _Behold._ "

The Jokers beheld Akechi, foregrounded by soldiers somehow more child than he ever was. 

"That is what I thought," said the old man. He waved his hand, and the girls returned where they must have been before, just behind him. As if they could see. 

("Lucky," whispered one to the other.)

"Behold the one who has been charged with your murder, again."

_Again?_

Akechi swallowed heavily, avoided counting the heads even harder now that he knew there was another one among them. Had Joker gone and d— Fuck, actually. He'd probably eaten shit on the Hellboat the second Akechi had given him the opportunity in the linguistic keys to the palace. How polite of the Detective Prince to even get out of the way by going and dying first.

The ship has no morgue. One of these guys was probably sopping wet. Fuck! Damn it, that was Akechi's deathright alone, and God knows he had little else to his name by now. 

The old man snapped his fingers, but the shimmering show of power didn't happen in a place Akechi could see it this time.

"Again," said the old man, "Do you have anything to say in your defense."

Akechi squinted like he could see into the throat, past the grin so sure of itself. It didn't work. "... Who in _Hell_ are you?"

(Behind him, a snort. Before him, a sharp gasp. This must be the Warden, to make Joker flinch.)

"Oh? Come now. You must know this old face well."

He'd managed to put a bemused sort of tilt in the eyebrows, but Akechi scrunched up his nose. Apparently, it was enough of a response. 

"Are you not so fond, after all?"

The shape of all these words was too much. Akechi couldn’t actually hear them, until... Oh. "Ask me something else." 

Akechi wasn't in a position to be making demands, but was he ever? He needed to hear more, to be sure. Oh, no.

("He's spinning gears," said a girl.)

"You have no power here. You are nothing."

Yup.

("I'd be careful," said the other, or maybe the same.)

It was Shido's voice, the classic intonation of politics wrapped around a core of… what. Wanton malice. Assured self-superiority. A god complex enough to make Akechi mortal, except when he's standing the supernatural kangaroo court instead. God, that was just it, wasn't it. 

How does he talk to his father. Akechi pressed the creak out of his voice, produced sincerity from nothing, "Is it you, steering us into a new age?"

The Warden straightened in his chair, wrapped one of his hands around the other. Akechi didn't make the mistake of looking at Joker, but they were watching carefully.

" _This_ is the one who brings you to ruination?"

The murmur rattled again, but Akechi couldn't hear it, didn't care. "Answer me."

Gloved fingers tapped over gloved knuckles, irregular, as if the gloves didn't fit. Or he wasn't used to them. The gloves. These hands. The old man had nails too long for them, last Akechi saw. "This," said the Warden to Joker, " _ends_ you, Trickster?"

 _Trickster_.

("Trickster…")

Maybe the stares of the dead proved them unalike after all, Akechi and Joker, but… Well. If Akechi was the kind of person who admitted to being wrong, there wouldn't _be_ dead Jokers. To his body count, he owed this obstinance, if nothing else.

An old man spat. "I expected better from you."

That's one Akechi's heard time and again, slipped into quasifascist tirades about elitism and excellence. The Jokers consulted amongst themselves, but Akechi focused hard on the Warden. He wasn't right, skin over bones in the exact wrong grotesque stretch.

This was Joker's _old man_ , hands wrapped around his throat like a newrope noose. This was no old man at all.

"What are you?" Akechi asked, the note of desperation hitting sour. He despised it, would have to avoid it next time if there was a next time. If. Oh, shit. He tightened his grip. Maybe he'd live to die to hang again, get a whole life to learn to talk smack better.

Maybe he wouldn't.

("Caroline—"

"Shh!")

"Me? You want to know what I am?" The Warden in the old man's skin spread his palms flat out on the desktop. "Eventuality."

This was a mistake. 

"The Conductor. Control." He rose from his seat. The old man was taller than Akechi had assumed, or this thing was too big. Too big, tall, forced to hunch. "The Holy Grail."

The wood of the scaffold creaked under the Warden's weight. He stepped up on it as if it were a stair, a halfstep. Easily.

"Do you want to know what I am?" He was taller than Akechi, crouched into his face. "First, you have to understand. Behind me is the jury."

Joker watched, or so Akechi presumed. Akechi couldn't see them past the mask.

"Behind you are the executioners."

The children did not watch because someone had the decency or perhaps the cruelty to blindfold them first.

"And I am the judge."

This is the sound of a nightmare, waking up in a cold sweat at fourteen. Judged worthy of a power, awarded a persona from— "What am I?"

It came out a whisper, and a whisper came in return. "Irrelevant."

The gloved hands found Akechi's scarred ones, perfectly torn by perfect teeth until he figured out patent leather would save him the grief in public. What a simple, elegant solution. His right hand was pried open, Joker started to stir, if only things were still so easy.

His other grip didn't break so easily. He was left-handed, after all. But it broke, and Akechi found himself standing on gallows proper at last. The god stared into him.

"Do you have last words?"

"Just one thing." Akechi closed one eye, tilted his head a bit. "You got the nose wrong."

Up so close, the way Akechi was when the Warden grabbed him to drip poison in his ear, he smelled like nothing at all. "If you see him in oblivion, you tell him that."

From the ground, there was a rally cry, and things became clear all at once, in the second.

The old man released him to delegate, barking contradictory commands at the kids. He could hear them moving, shuffling steps that asked the other which to follow, but they’d figure it out soon enough— Akechi looked down, just to see his feet fall, watch the ground lurch close. This would be new. 

Something was there, scratched on the trapdoor just below him, but he couldn't quite see it, because...

The scaffold started to rattle, shake, Joker had a screaming prison riot in his multitudes after all. The ranks crashed against the ruling they realized was coming. There was nothing to do but frenzy, whip up into a violence undeniable even by… 

The Warden. The Warden, stupidest of them all. He'd turned away from Akechi, finally demanded the little girl with the shocking baton drum this into _order_ , tacked on Akechi's execution at the end of the breath. An afterthought. It was almost funny that he hadn't caught what he'd said, and that made him stupid.

 _If you see him._ Big "if". Huge "if".

The door and its strange marking fell out from beneath him. Joker screamed, Joker cried, the electric crackle started right before Akechi was made to quit listening. If the old man was still around, maybe they've all got a chance after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joker's 'hick accent' is from inaba, which i realize i forgot to mention a little bit back. canon to this fic, joker has three of yosuke's wallets in the cardboard box he brought.
> 
> One of the spreadsheets in my pocket is the Greek Chorus Of Dead Jokers, most of whom are not relevant and will not appear. here's the rundown on these two, who were handpicked just for you:
> 
> Three of Swords:  
> Death- Nov 20  
> Maxed Links: Iwai, Ryuji, Mishima, Chihaya, Ohya, Tora  
> Stats  
> kindness - 0  
> smarts - 1  
> guts - 5  
> proficiency - like 2  
> charm - 3
> 
> Decidedly one of the more unpleasant Jokers. Perceived as vain in the extreme. He’s probably the bitterest that Akechi shot him— not necessarily the betrayal, but the couple of Jokers before him made it worse-- not the first and not the last! A betrayal that he should have seen coming, because it came and came and came. ANYWAY. in the betting pool you know exists he always puts down on early deaths for akechi out of wishful thinking if nothing else. the loop that brought about 9 of cups hurt a lot but, he won, so lol. 
> 
> Nine of Cups:  
> Death: April 30th  
> Maxed links: ):  
> Stats  
> kindness- 2  
> smarts- 2  
> guts- 0  
> proficiency- 3 ???  
> charm- 1
> 
> The boy who got ruined for fun. the Joker collective is SUPER confused as to how his stats were this good in APRIL, and most of them are really jealous. the answer is that his insomnia-variant ass ignored morgana and never slept. read EVERYTHING. except ghost stories. he can’t read those at night but is “embarrassed” to read them during the day. anyway. oof ouch the sound of my BONES, died on the way up the diet building before he met shido for the first time. He really did think he could make the jump out that window if he tried— it was, if you're careful enough with words, a genuine parkour accident. Yagami Ren feels very bad about this! This Joker doesn’t hold the grudge though. He feels bad for Akechi, lmao, come on, the guy's not so bad, he tried to help! and he's... so cool... etc etc.
> 
> Three is gonna kill him again over his little puppycrush for a heaping fistful of reasons.
> 
> \--
> 
> as usual, thanks for sticking with me. if you wanna listen to my akechi playlist because, jesus christ, why do i have so much akechi stuff, hmu @ spherekuriboh at tumblr
> 
> this fic is... almost over, wow. it's got maybe three chapters left? anyway. see you next week!


	6. OCEANS PULL THE MOON

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Akechi ditches the wrong party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im sorry to say it but the only shido characterization is handsome jack borderlands2. this is also where the plot just straight up spins out into self indulgence-- if you havent played persona 2, it doesn't matter much, but know that That Guy isn't an oc of mine fsjljfks
> 
> there's a suicide mention in this chapter, if you squint. and also. shido talks about sex. its not explicit obviously but i suffer personally.

Being led up into the clown car rarely worked out well for Akechi, but it was only the end of September. They were skirting around the Spaceport, still, in what Sakamoto inelegantly insists is _casing the joint_ every time. Every time? Every time, probably. Akechi usually wasn’t in the Robin Hood outfit when he heard it, but, whatever. Asking questions was becoming cumbersome, safety exists both in numbers and pretending that he didn’t suddenly gain consciousness two days ago.

Another go around. 

There was no reason for Akechi to go up the stairs. That’s where Phantom Thieves meet— more importantly, that’s where Joker lives. However, no easy excuses availed themselves when the question came at him over Sunday morning coffee. What could he claim, modesty? To _Joker_? No way that flies. Akechi drummed his fingers against the countertop, but it wasn’t a no.

It very much wasn’t a no, and Joker’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair at the fact. He grabbed Akechi’s hand— _grabbed his hand,_ Christ, there really was no escaping this one. 

“This is unprofessional?!”

Joker made the grating sound he calls laughing. If things don’t go to shit, Akechi needs to find another cafe.The stairs were unavoidable, but Akechi suddenly found himself stranded in the middle of the flight alone— as quickly as he’d been grabbed, Joker dropped contact and bound up first. Can nothing be easy? Akechi was alone on the stairs. If he tried to leave now, he’d probably fall down and rebreak his neck or something— no, better to see what was in store up there. 

It was definitely something. It’s always something.

For extra fun, Akechi closed his eyes, got up to the landing without deadly incident.

“ _SURPRISE!_ ”

The chorus of voices did indeed surprise him. Crammed up here was the entire circus, surrounding a cake in Sakura’s hands. It said, in Kitagawa's even script, _HAPPY FAKE BIRTHDAY!_

It’s September 25th. That _is_ what his stupid statcards say, that it’s Akechi Goro's birthday! It's also a lie, and not even the kind he can reveal to them to diffuse the situation— they know all of those things, a subtle Agi setting off a sparkler between Takamaki's fingers.

( _"What the FUCK."_ ) 

Akechi decided to pretend this was a normal thing, put the tone of pleasant exasperation in his voice. “How did you know?”

His question gave them leave to separate, and the Phantom Thieves of Hearts broke formation satisfied. Sakura remained in the center of the room, offering the cake as if her smugass answer was written on it somewhere else. Not what he's looking for.

His first instinct was to accuse Makoto as she crossed in front of him towards the chairs, but no. She was sworn to secrecy, damn it, and if she breaks _pinky promises_ on top of pinkies then he’d have to kill her. Or, die trying. Certainly the latter. She caught his eye, likely read his expression if not his mind, and said, “Futaba looked you up on… Dark Google?”

Aha. The way Makoto’s face scrunched told Akechi all he needed to know. That was a recycled phrase, and his quarrel was with Sakura after all, then. If she wasn’t running the Phansite in her endless amounts of free time, she must be doing something else, such as ruining his life personally. Akechi pushed his hands through his hair, found it pleasingly normal to the touch. “Were you stalking my Twitter or something?”

No, obviously not. That’s a carefully curated public image. If there was a hole that big in his story, he’d face bigger, more tangible, more mob-shaped consequences than this sad mockery. Sakura smiled wide at him. “Oh! I hacked your Twitter.” (At Akechi’s choked sound of discontent, Sakura smiled wider at him,) “But that was for something else, don’t even worry about it.”

Okumura by the desk touched a finger to her lips. “No. I’d be worried, actually.”

A coughing laugh disguised by Kitagawa came from by the bookshelf that held no books.

“Haruuu!”

“I can only speak the truth.” In Okumura’s unfree hand was… a gift bag. There were several of them, heaped next to her. They got him gifts, for his fake birthday. “Sorry, Futaba.”

“Wait,” Takamaki, from the bed with the cat and Sakamoto, “What’s’ Dark Google’?”

“‘s a euphemism, ‘cause Futaba’s too classy to say she wrecked his whole shit in like twenty seconds.”

Akechi had to strip this concept free from Sakamoto’s shit tone to consider it— that Sakura was good, too good, and that he should have taken her seriously the whole time. This was true, everybody knew it, and fuck Sakamoto for pointing it out.

The spent sparkler twirled in Takamaki's hands, found a second life in becoming a tool to bother Sakamoto. Akechi realized this the second before Takamaki poked at him with it.

"Ow! Shit!"

"Where'd you get twenty seconds?"

"I was here and I heard her screaming about it from Sojiro's? That frickin' hurt, it's still hot!"

"Is it?!"

That's not how sparklers work. It is, however,how Agi works. Takamaki dusted a Dia onto him— it must have been _just_ a Dia, since it lacked any sort of luster, just a quick apologetic touch.

"Asshole," he muttered, joking? Presumably joking, with a grin on his— Takamaki flicked him on the ear.

"Ow!"

“If you two're done, it IS a euphemism,” Futaba moved, plopped the cake down gently on the table. Joker passed behind her with a knife, which he flipped in his hands even though they weren’t in the Metaverse and he wasn’t as cool in real life. Akechi debated thinking about the feeling of the hairline scars on his fingers and decided against it when he caught the damn thing by the handle. “I DID wreck his shit, and I _HAVE_ seen the forbidden middle-school Gogo.”

Joker froze, where he was cutting the cake with the inappropriate knife. The room froze, everyone focusing on Sakura as if she was the only thing there. “Middle school!?”

"It is," Kitagawa said, in the obnoxious way Kitagawa says, "Bad."

"For _real_ , I thought WE looked busted-up back then."

Takamaki raised her eyebrows. "You mean you?"

"I mean us!"

“God knows all," Sakura said, putting her hands up palms out, "And he means _y'all_."

"FUTABA?"

Oh, this was going to spiral, but fortunately, it would ding everyone else on the way down. Akechi glanced behind him. Maybe he could just—

"Did Go— Akechi, already have braces in middle school?"

Insistence on formality won the day from her, but Makoto was actually curious. Akechi couldn't stop himself from squeaking, "You traitor!"

"Ohh, _shit_ , Akechi wore _braces_!?"

No point in lying about it now, an entire two years of intense suffering and another few of blocking it out. "Try it some time, Sakamoto."

"Hey!”

He got braces in the second year of middle school. If he _hadn’t_ been wearing braces in the picture they’d seen, then this was worse than Akechi thought. Hell. There was one picture that could be, Hell!

“I’m sorry,” Joker said, turning to face his friends, “Are you telling me that you _didn’t_ think this was pertinent information to share with your _leader_.”

Sakura held out one of her palms-out hands palm-up. “That’ll be ten thousand yen.”

“Only?” Okumura hummed. 

Cats should not understand blackmail or the abstract concept of money, but to Akechi's unfortunate horror, Mona agreed. “I think you could get more for tha—"

Before he could finish, Joker slapped a comically large amount of cash money into her hand. "Keep the change," he said, flicking his hair, watching Sakura carefully down his nose.

"This's a lotta change…"

"Joker!" Makoto stood, outraged, as if she was going to defend her dear friend Akechi, but, "That's an irresponsible use of Mementos money!"

"Sold." Kitagawa started crossing the room. He pulled his thin wallet out, from it produced— _Hell_ no—

In what could only be described as a fit of self-preservation, Akechi threw the only thing of consequence he had in his pockets, which was unfortunately the knife he keeps there. Sakamoto's offended _Woah!_ didn't stop him from ducking out of the way. The offending walletsize was pinned to the wall over Joker’s bed, offending middle schooler placed into extreme time-out for getting into a fight not twenty minutes before he had to sit in front of the camera.

He’d won.

"Hey!" Joker took off his glasses to glare at full power, "I just bought that!"

"Ooooo, Boss is gonna _kill you!_ "

The knife hadn't even gone in that deep, it was fine, but Akechi didn't say so. Instead he moved to try to retrieve it— no, alas. Makoto stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, and it was Okumura who leaned over and teased the blade out. The wood hadn't even _splintered_ that much. The picture slipped off under the— 

"How."

Makoto was staring directly at him.

"How _what_."

"You suck at darts! You could have killed Yusuke, but you didn’t even touch him!" Makoto looked over her shoulder, "You _should_ have, by all rights, just killed Yusuke!"

( _Kitagawa, nonplussed, holding his bleeding hand as if it was a joke_ —) 

"Your vote of confidence in my reflexes is appreciated, Makoto."

The thought hadn't occurred to him. Technically speaking, _no_ thought occurred to him, but Hell if he was gonna admit that. Akechi leaned away from her touch instead. "It would have achieved my purpose."

Kitagawa looked blandly at Akechi, rubbed the fingers of his now empty hand against his thumb. "Thanks, you useless piece of television set trash."

There was something wrong with the insult, and the halfassed vitriol actually startled Akechi into smiling. "There isn't enough of you to hit, Kitagawa, relax."

"Gogo!"

"With a knife, certainly," Kitagawa was bland, too, but the edge in his voice held attention, "but the embarrassment radiating off of you now could kill a horse." He paused, dragged his hand halfway down his face and held it there. "Not to imply you aren't usually an embarrassment, obviously."

" _Inari!_ "

"Take paint thinner a little less literally and maybe you could take me someday."

"Two appearance cracks in a row. Is that really the best you can do?" Kitagawa looked at Akechi from between his spindly fingers, "If so, you've already lost."

Akechi realized that Kitagawa was smiling back. God, was this _bantering_? Disgusting. "Can I have my knife back."

“Your knife? You mean your effin’ Batarang?”

It was Sakamoto talking, even though the thing was shining in Okumura’s hands. 

“It’s a Birdarang—” Quickly but not fast enough Akechi bit down on the end of his sentence. Oh, that was a mistake, already sprung fully-formed from his mouth.

“Sorry, Gogo, that’s a knockoff.”

Like he didn’t know that, but, what, is he supposed to kill people with his collectibles? He didn’t have a chance to put together the words for Sakura before Okumura snapped the Birdarang down the middle. It made a pathetic sound, sad, exactly like something cheap cracking in half. If someone else had done it, they would have said something funny, but Okumura’s middle-distance stare made them all wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Suddenly she phased back in. Looking at the two divorced blades, she said, “If you don’t take care of your toys, they break."

Now returning to your regularly scheduled idiot programming, Akechi two knives down if anyone had the kind of attention to be technical about it. 

People had been moving while he was waiting around, which Akechi didn’t realize until Takamaki turned around to hand him a slice of cake on a… paper plate with his own winking face on it. Okay. Instinctively he passed it on to Makoto. Another came. Again, he passed it off. 

Another. Makoto had cake in her hand, and so did everyone else in this room. _Shit._ What now, were they all going to sing? He’d probably die if they tried. Oh fuck they might start singing.

“I can’t eat this!” He shouted before they could, winced at his own volume.

“Aww,” that was Three over Nine, mocking him from Joker’s mouth, “Don’t be a spoilsport.”

“I’m not. Did you know I’m deathly allergic to hazelnuts? All tree nuts, probably. Sorry…”

“Oh!” Takamaki raised her pointer finger like a wanton gun, “I did know that. We made this cake for you.”

_They made this cake for him._ Okay. Okay. Fuck. “It’s really not my birthday, you know?”

“Dude, we know you’re Librafaking, give it up.”

Sakura snorted. “Yeah, plus, this isn’t even a birthday cake, dipshit. It’s a take-the-piss-out-of-you cake. Next.”

Oh, right, they knew that. “How _did_ you know that?”

“Literally, she Googled you.” Kitagawa arched his eyebrows. “Okita Goro isn’t a common name."

_Cheating._

“Okita…” Joker looked thoughtful, as if he was going to say something else but thought better of it. Maybe he remembered that Akechi would lead him to suffer, and suffer, and suffer, and—

( _They could sing_.)

“I’m a murderer!”

“Yo!”

Whatever Sakamoto was about to say, it wasn’t actually important.

“I’m a murder on a—” fuck it “— patricidal rampage!”

Makoto’s shock almost hurt, but not everyone has dead cop angels hanging around their heads, or whatever, if that was even why she was making that face. “Slow down.”

Nope. “Shido’s my dad.”

He didn’t need to specify. It was September and he already said ‘patricide’, even if it wasn’t exactly right. They knew who he was gunning for. Makoto shut her damn mouth, and Akechi had to do his specific addresses now.

To Joker. “I’ve killed you.”

Not that the Jokers behind his eyes needed reminding, but the impassive look on this one’s face didn’t tell Akechi anything about what he would say to the others when he met them. Almost out of tries, and Akechi was still ruining everything. 

To Sakura. “I killed your mom.” That one was news to the others, apparently, because the whole room lurched towards him on a stabbing instinct. He didn’t want to process it, so he turned to Okumura to say, “I also killed your dad but that bastard had it c—”

“I know!” Somehow, she managed to interrupt him. Maybe it was because Akechi was staring. She clutched the paper plate in her hands. “I know that! We were being _civil_!”

Civ— “Civil!?”

Okumura, he realized suddenly, thinks he’s a fucking idiot. In a second he could see it, her swallowed rage, and he remembered why he was usually running from her like his meaningless life depended on it. She sighed, became placid like a lake people drown in. “Yes.”

( _She would have said, "I don't think anyone here wants to fight you," looking carefully forward at Sakura—_ )

Akechi’s phone went off, silencing Okumura before she could go on. Never before has he been happy to hear Shido on the line, slurring a simple command at him. _Now._

In the eyes of his companions, who definitely heard that, he saw fear reflected out. They watched him pass his slice of cake gently to the cat, resting on the floor, and before any of them could say— “No!” “Wait!” “Stop!”— he’d backed down the stairs too fast for it to be an apology.

***

He didn’t stop running until he hit the station.

( _That was a mistake, Sakamoto’s hand closing around his collar—)_

Akechi struggled to look normal, inconspicuous, didn’t turn around.

( _Makoto slipped into step with him like nothing—)_

He was as alone as one can get on a relatively uncrowded train platform. He trailed through the crowd— ( _Bad move, Takamaki walking towards him_ )— hands pushed deep into his pockets— ( _Off-balance, Mona hitting his shoulder took him down_ ) — nearly home free. 

He was lucky.

The train arrived. Akechi hurried onto it, claimed an unremarkable seat. It was the middle of a Sunday, he was fine, ( _except for Okumura and Kitagawa sitting down on either side_ ) he was fine. He pulled out his phone, fiddled with it. The group chat was silent as the grave. Joker was texting him so fast his phone didn’t have the time to stop vibrating. Akechi’s thumb hovered over the thread ( _and he clicked, reading the—)_

Shut up. He silenced the damn thing as the train lurched into movement. If Shido called again, well, Akechi was on his way anyway. Since he was here, he cleared the notifications from other apps— Instagram, Twitter, oh, no. It's been his turn in Words with Friends since last night— 

The door to the car opened, admitted a stumbling blonde woman. She must have been drunk, with the way tears were streaming down her face, but even though he struggled not to look Akechi felt her gaze on him. It was full of something. He didn’t want to know. He had the feeling he didn’t want to know.

( _He looked at her and noticed that she could see the future and noticed that she could tell it to him and asked her very quietly_ )

He didn't want to know.

“Happy birthday,” she whispered into the silence, the words softened by defeat and an accent Akechi didn’t know, "to you…"

He got up and left the car.

***

If there’s anything to dislike about Togo Hifumi, it’s that she cheats in Words With Friends. Not that Akechi could prove it, but her little gloating emojis in the chat made him wish it was true. Maybe she’s the one who remembers these games, his stupid little mistakes, because he sure as Hell doesn’t. It was all too small. Small things are ground into cosmic dust that slips easily through his fingers. Akechi is left clutching mostly ends, surrounded by things that repeat themselves enough to get annoying. All this living and he isn't even older.

Togo put down ‘komamei’ on a triple word score. Maybe there’s just an infinite number of Scrabbles possible, and he just keeps blundering into setting them up.

Akechi shifted his tiles around, considered them, pointedly did not look up when the door to this shitty sideroom opened. He knew it was Becky. It had to be, and she was allowed. Sharing the prime panic attack real estate was only polite, considering it was just the two of them who knew about this place on the first floor at all. 

The maid outfit didn’t hinder her in plopping down on the floor beside him. “You look tired,” she said, “Have you eaten today?”

“Hello, Becky.” She looked beat. Her habit of putting on a brave face for him tapers off around June every time, and he never missed it. “I could ask the same.”

“Shido caters.”

“No he doesn’t.”

“No, he doesn’t.” she sighed deeply, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “How long have you been here?”

“Not long. I had my fit on the way.”

The blonde woman had gasped softly when he rose, tried to stop him with words that were spineless and unsure of themselves. If Akechi had hesitated, he would have heard the way the letters were like her feet, stumbling into one another in ways that should have bothered him, shouldn’t have been possible, but he hadn’t hesitated and had left her alone. He was busy, after all, on another road probably leading to the bloody downfall of Rome, and the crying was cramping his resolve.

Entering this building— or, now, leaving this room— was a gamble he’d likely lose. But that was a different problem.

Becky didn’t bother to disguise her concern, but said nothing. She must know him by now... but not that well, because as soon as he thought it, she said, "What's with the face. Are you getting your butt kicked again."

He handed her his phone, Scrabbleboard open.

"Ouch."

From goes-around, Akechi knew Becky largely in negatives. Her name wasn't Becky, she never left Japan how she'd planned to after college, she wasn't happy in this job or her other one, and she didn't consider collusion cheating at Words with Friends.

"Got it. Wait, no, sh...oot.”

She tilted it at him so he could see it. ‘Shoobute’ was, apparently, not a valid play. Akechi could see why.

“You can’t use words you made up, Becky.”

“I did not make this up. Well. No. Language is a social construct, but the arbitrary nature of the sign—”

Becky probably majored in linguistics, since she slipped into the familiar intonation without even noticing. Akechi kindly tuned her lesson out, just let the same-y explanation wash over him. It was probably rude, but oh well. She was choosing words carefully, quickly, spinning them from nothing into a quick description of semiotics conceptually, followed by her biggest beef with the concept as applied to Japanese, aaaaand she’d just asked him a question he hadn’t been paying attention to.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said to ask her. You’re playing with the shogi girl, right?”

_The shogi girl._ Becky politely ignored the presence of idols in her life, at least as hard as Akechi refused to guess at her day job. “I am.”

She proffered the phone, and Akechi popped open the gloating corner. “She gets a kick out of it,” he explained, even though Becky was pretending not to look at the log. There was little to be seen but shouts of disconnected anguish and even less coherent expressions of success— not all of them Togo’s, which was inconvenient now. If anyone’s insistent Akechi is a normal person, it’s Becky Maid, and he refused to give her any proof. 

“I asked," he said, because he had. _Is shoobute not a word?_

The reply was instant. _If you’re a fool, certainly. Are you a fool?_

“She wants to know what you mean.”

“It’s a… shoobute. You know what that is. It’s like…” She tapped the nails of her left hand against her head, “it’s like, staking the whole game on a single move.”

This would have been heavy-handed enough for him to remember it, if he'd experienced this before.

_Or perhaps you admit disadvantage, Akechi Goro, if you are attempting shoobute now. Are you a loser? c: < _

Akechi locked his phone without submitting something else. If Togo Hifumi was gonna be a smartass, she could wait. “I get it.”

The universe was out to mock him with its dying breath, as if he could solve his problems now by going and singing Happy Birthday with the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. They all had bigger issues than civility, and the wheels came off of that one as quickly as Akechi could pry them.

“I’m glad. If you have any—”

_questions, please ask any time._ She was using a script Akechi had heard before and didn’t feel bad interrupting. “Go home.”

“What.”

“There’s a company party going on?”

Hesitantly, Becky nodded. Shido would be up there, with Becky’s entire company. Akechi shook his head. “Just. Go home. You don’t want to be upstairs.”

“Neither do you.” He can't argue with her on that one. If it doesn't kill him, he'd be surprised. She rose elegantly from her weird sitting position— at least as elegant as someone in that outfit could be considered— and put her hands on her hips. "Come back with me. I'll drop you off on the way."

“You’re actually playing hooky?”

“It’s Sunday!” 

He’d struck a nerve with something. They stared at each other in a tensely confused moment. He avoided thinking the word— hooky, _teacher,_ damn it, no,— kept it off the blankness of his expression.

“Oh.” Becky laughed once, very tired, to herself. “Right. Yeah. Okay. Let’s go.”

“I got summoned.” Akechi pointed at the ceiling. He had to go up eventually, and eventually was very soon, if he didn’t want to deal with the cavalry. 

“I know that. I was supposed to pick you up.” Oh. It was rude of him not to text, probably, she wasted the gas between here and his apartment looking for him. “But what if—”

_What if._ Shido sends Ren to hunt him down, is what if, and that’s no good for anybody. “See you later, Becky.”

“I’ll wait?” She rubbed her hand against the side of her face. “I don’t have a good feeling.”

“Do you ever?”

She looked dead on her feet. Maybe it was the outfit. “You got me there. But—”

_What about you_ , because she never just left him behind. Imagine, someone giving a damn about teenagers. “I’ll feel better if one of us isn’t here.”

She gave him a long, flat stare, and Akechi could hear a host of arguments clamoring indistinctly in the wind. 

“Okay,” she said at last, “I guess.”

“Bye.”

Akechi turned away from her. She trusted him.

“T—” ( _She told him something important_ ) “Take care of yourself.”

She might follow him up there if he doesn’t go now. Akechi walked out of the room first, crossed the hallway towards the elevators. He knew, if he turned around, that he’d see Becky leaving through the front door. Usually he didn’t watch, but if she followed him up— bad. If she was looking back too, worse. He might go with her instead.

God.

He caved and turned. Becky was waving, a simple thing thrown over her shoulder on her way out, something to keep him company while he waited for the elevator to come.

***

He’d known staying would be a mistake the second he’d been invited to sit, but by then, there had been nothing else for Akechi to do but settle uneasily on the couch that faced his boss. That was a full half hour ago at least, and Akechi spent the entire time schooling his expression into a facsimile of giving a shit, as if it mattered. It doesn't, because the very important _now_ thing that he was called to listen to was Shido’s drunk monologue about sex.

"If you wanna fuck a woman," Shido slurred over the rim of something purple, "just fry her first."

Was this really better than what he’d left behind? Even running away from his demons, he’d showed up here like some kind of trained pet— again, as if it would matter. Refusing wouldn't compromise his position. Refusing _never_ would have compromised his position, since Shido had called his eighteen year old boy for some good old father-son bonding and had even bothered to be smashed for it.

He knows. He's known this entire time. 

( _Akechi opened his mouth out of turn and is shot in the chest._ )

Akechi clenched the fist that was under the table, fingernails pressing into the soft skin of his palms. He should have left with Becky.

"They're never as good after you do it, but you always gotta. Take… I dunno. Your mom."

Akechi struggled to look at none of the women in this room, but there were so many of them, everywhere. Closing his eyes would leave him open for something else, so he continued to struggle.

"You remember her, right? Neurotic as all fuck. Always desperate to avoid, whatsit, _political fallout_?"

Neat half-moon tears happened one by one in his palm, pinky-ring-middle-index and Shido was still snickering into his drink. The Grand Plan had been ruined from the start, hadn’t it, God damn _Okita Goro_ straight to Hell with the bathwater. He thought it would be… what, fitting? Funny? He should have thought up a better name for his resume.

Nobody ever forgot Okita Ayumi. That was the point all along.

"Miss that woman. Coulda been a lot easier." The purple drink disappeared, empty cup replaced instantly by one of the anonymous women in the office. They were all, Akechi remembered belatedly, here for his father and his father alone. Undoubtedly they were being paid double— triple— he elected to not think about it, much less what it would cost Becky if someone noticed her gone. Akechi could feel himself being forcibly ignored by the professionals, even as they waited discreetly for mentions of their own names. " _Tax evasion._ Imagine. She coulda gotten me, too."

"You don't pay taxes?"

People love small talk, Shido doubly so. Akechi's surprise-incredulity was hilarious, obviously, since he'd missed something so big. Stupid kid.

"Avatars of GOD do not owe debts to society—" He slammed the drink back so hard that Akechi nearly flinched "— but Yumi could have gotten me thrown in jail for decades—" Another one appeared, toxic-looking orange sloshing in a tall glass "— holy shit, that bitch never missed a gory detail. Down to the last yen every time."

The boxes upon boxes that exist in the memory of a childhood home shifted. Begged to be opened. Akechi swallowed harshly, pushed them back into place. "She was a good secretary, I guess."

It was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, trying to sweep all the files into the smoky corners of his mind. They were all over that house that turned to ash. What was in them? He'd never asked.

"A _good_ secretary would have looked the other way." 

Tone snapped Akechi back into the present. His life was in danger, as usual, of course. "I suppose," he said. This was the edge of a tirade, him the only yes-man in range. He took a deep breath that reminded him he had ribs that could be broken.

"A good secretary wouldn't have run away with the fucking kid."

"Sure."

( _“No.” He is shot in the chest._ )

"A good secretary would have listened to reason."

"Right."

(“ _No.” He is shot in the chest._ )

"A good secretary wouldn't have gone and gotten a bullet in her."

Freeze. "She jumped off a roof," Akechi said automatically. That was a test, said Shido's slimy smile. ( _Yesmen who tell lies fall from favor and windows._ ) Before he could think too hard about that, again the conversation turned.

"Yeah, yeah. 'Course she did. A waste. So now I pay taxes." Shido's look filled Akechi with empty. "And now you clean up messes for me."

"Messes?"

"I wish you weren't so sloppy." The anger came on like a squall, but Akechi knew better by now than to blink, "If I needed useless bastards running around, I'd have kept sending Ren."

Ren only ever hesitated, but he always took shots in the end.

( _Akechi knew better than to get shot, and waited._ )

"Ha! You should see the look on your face. Relax." Shido was all smiles of a man untouchable again. Akechi knew better than to get shot, and waited. "I didn't even think to tell you about Wakaba's little shut-in. Don’t worry about it."

The wheels started spinning.

A weird little shut-in, Shido's useless nonentity of a bastard who is ( _literally_ )— Akechi cleared his throat to disguise his choke, shit. Shit! What an awful time to realize Futaba is fucking ( _MEDJED)_. He shifted, almost brought up the wrong hand to cover his polite cough. Smearing blood all over his face would have been… sloppy.

"It worked out in the end, didn’t it?" Shido whistled, traced a spiral in the air like a falling plane. Someone did take the fall for that, for Wakaba, and it turned out to be Akechi’s fucking _sister._ Terrorism runs in the family and Akechi was losing that fight too. So much for the prodigal son! The spiral hit its terminal point, and the struggling plane in Shido’s hand exploded with a simple breath of air. This was her only higher purpose, if only Akechi had never existed.

He thought that was funny, Shido, and laughed. Kept laughing. Wakaba was his sister's mom. Of course that was funny. 

Akechi could feel the prickle of the old man's ire on his skin. Coming here was pointless, and he would not be allowed to leave. He’d been allowed too much information to be _allowed_ to leave, but maybe he could sneak back into the unsalvageable social situation he’d ditched at Leblanc if he tried really hard. There might even be cake left. 

He had to tell her everything.

"And that's why you gotta fry 'em first!"

If he isn’t dead. This was such a stupid thing to do. The old man was gonna have a speech from Hell waiting. "Of course. Anything else, sir."

"Yeah," Shido stuck the drink straight out so quickly it splashed the table. "Loosen up, will you? Your child eyes are killing my buzz.”

Absolutely the fuck not. With his left hand, the one that wasn’t dripping blood onto his shoes just yet but would be if this kept on, Akechi waved it away. He was surprised at how easily it moved through the air that was becoming so hard to breathe.

"What, are you seriously _that_ picky?"

"I'm... sorry?"

"God, ingrateful children do exist. Look _around_."

On cue, Akechi tried again to find the blank spot of wall that must exist. Instead, he caught sight of the only other man in this room, Yagami Ren. He seemed to be busy, looking for something, and, to his absolute discredit, hadn’t realized Akechi had made him out. What’s the world coming to?

“Excuse me,” Akechi and Shido turned to the woman who was talking to them now. “Are you alright?”

Akechi craned his neck just a little bit, to avoid looking at her too closely.

“Is that—” began Shido, the edge of warning setting the edges of Akechi’s fingernails back into their grooves.

“Oh… My deepest apologies…. Master?” She shifted to make stupid pose the maids are taught to do, but unfortunately Akechi has been around enough to know that she was doing it wrong. Was she new…? Akechi noticed the bartowel she had in the hand that hadn’t moved, “But I think he’s hurt?”

“Oh, _is he_.” (Akechi avoided sucking in a breath. Shido assumed this was a come-on and not simple perception.) “Go ahead, boy. Take it.”

That was a direct order. Despite hearing it, the woman didn't make it easy, failed to extend her hand and meet him halfway. Maybe she's as grossed out by the implication as any professional, adult, or human being should be.

That was fair.

Akechi silently took a corner of the towel, but moving it made it clear to him that the woman was holding a gun under it. Of course she was. HOW was a question all its own— Yagami isn’t bad at his job, usually takes care of this kind of— Oh.

Ren is here, and he’s looking for something, isn’t he, much in the same way Akechi is now looking for a way to not get shot. Slowly, carefully, he put the edge down and turned in his seat.

“Actually, I think I’m okay,” The words dripped out slowly, carefully too, “But I am taking my leave, sir—”

“Oh, for the love of God _,_ Akechi.”

Shido leaned forward and yanked the towel out of her hand. ( _Akechi takes a bullet_ ) The bullet whiffed, blasted a hole into the ugly couch Shido had claimed for himself. Sloppy for an assassination. If only she hadn't missed…

Well. If she hadn't missed, she would have hit Akechi. How did he know that?

Akechi threw himself backwards, over the back of the couch that he’d been sitting on. The room was screaming. He tumbled to the ground. It was a small impact, his back with the disgusting yellow carpet, but it still rattled the air out of him. He needed to get out, but he also needed a second.

One. It was fine. He was fine. He scrambled to his feet, briefly joined the crowd in its panicked rush out, but along the way received onetwothree too many elbows to the chest, hurthurthurt more than it should have. The shock sent him back towards the desk instead. What the Hell, that hurt.

A hand grabbed his shoulder, spun him around. The maid with a gun was threatening him.

“WHERE DID HE GO!”

Before Akechi could answer, the barrel of the gun pressed hard into his chest. He tried to step back, away, ran into Shido’s desk. Ow, ow, ow, no escape. He had to shout over the clamor of the room, “WHO!”

She didn’t think he was funny, scowled like she’d kill him, but it was obvious in her pause that she knew who he was— Well. Scratch that. His face has been plastered all over the news for ages now. Everybody knows it.

She also saw him consorting with Japan's favorite fascist. At that point, he should appreciate the hesitation, yet… The problem ended up being that nobody knows Akechi well enough. Nine, after all, still thought there was something worth salvaging here, if only he could see Akechi now. Fuck that, he’d rather be shot in the chest. What?

As the thought crossed his mind, the woman’s eyes hardened. “DON’T MOCK ME!”

God. Is that what he sounds like when he says that? Pathetic.

She fired off a round by his ear, which split like a headache. It fractured Shido's floor-to-ceiling window in a way that would be intimidating if Akechi were scared of that kind of thing, cracking. It occurred to him he could go for it, now, it was just the desk between him and… ( _a parkour accident_ ). Shit. He wouldn’t make it. Doorway it is.

It was suddenly quiet. The room was empty now, or almost. A movement behind the woman’s head caught his attention— Yagami Ren, expert bodyguard, had located the gun at last. Shido must have escaped somewhere, safe enough among the bodies he pretends to own— 

Yagami Ren, expert communicator, fired off his own warning shot to announce himself. It decimated Shido’s monitor, probably on purpose, and kept going through the window, too. A bad day to be a window. The woman spun, realigned her priorities. Yagami pointed his gun right back at her.

A perfect picture of a classic standoff. None of this was Akechi’s problem, except that they were between him and leaving.

He watched carefully, tuning out their unfamiliar… what, banter? God save him if it was banter, God save him twice over if it wasn’t. Maybe if he paid attention, he could suss out whether Yagami actually knew the literal assassin or was just flirting with her because she snuck in wearing a fetish outfit, but that risked... knowing things. Frankly, he’d rather be shot in the ch— no! Stop that. Listening was out of the question. Try again.

The Call of Chaos would get him shot. No.

He could... kill them both and walk out in an old-fashioned way. He's done worse for less, unquestionably, but… Ugh. It would figure that murder makes his skin crawl now. If he could manage it (if!) what would the world lose? Someone who tried to help Akechi and someone willing to kill Shido? Rare things, actually. At least, rarer than Akechi himself. He looked down, just to check. No muck was leaking out of his hurting chest. Okay. No.

Option three was to clip through to the Metaverse. He was too close to them, they'd come with, and the problem would exacerbate itself tenfold— magic being real doesn't help him _not_ kill things. It only makes him better at it. His hands were made to ruin, he supposed... if only because he made them that way. Two personae and he hadn't even kept a lousy Recarm, cheap as a knockoff and twice as flimsy— Damn it, Okumura broke his knife earlier, too. He’s got nothing to end this with. He’s gotta make it there by himself.

Ren was looking at him, saying something… He read the word _dinner_ on his lips. Oh boy. That's _negotiating_ , and the situation was worse than Akechi thought. He had to get gone, fast. The door was no longer an option.

"Sorry," he said, leaking the magic from under his skin out with the blood still dripping from his hand.

Oh. He wasn’t wearing gloves. That's weird.

The desk exploded into woodchips and the sad bits of computer scattered on its surface popped high into the air. It probably would have been very cinematic, if it hadn’t startled the woman into shooting at Yagami, and Yagami into shooting back.

She missed, not on purpose.

The thing about Yagami is that his warning shots are meant to miss. The woman was fine. Akechi, less so, the sharphot in his arm undoubtedly going to turn stickywet very soon. God damn it does he owe Ren one, but Akechi was already on his way out. Getting shot didn’t affect his momentum, pushed him even harder… out... the window….

( _Caught a bullet off the roof_ , _he said,_ )

Fuck. Akechi yelled the stupid words at his stupid phone before he could hit the stupid cars in the stupid parking lot with his stupid body and die. He was so stupid.

***

Even though he'd been hurtling down the side of the Diet building, Akechi landed hard on his bed. The cheap frame complained at his sudden weight. Undoubtedly, blood was soaking into the sheets. 

This was a rare opportunity, since he was last seen hurtling down the side of the Diet Building.

“Mom.”

Nobody answered. ( _She was there. “Yes?”_ )

“What happened to you?”

( _She touched her knuckles to her lips._ _“More specific, son?”_ )

The ship rattled, shook. All was not well. The water was choppy, _pissed_. “What I said is what I meant.”

( _She looked at him fondly._ )

He could just ask her how she died, busied himself with basic wound care instead. The room ached in its expectant silence.

( _“I used to have a better boss,” she said at last, sighing. Akechi was thankful that his mother would always humor him. “But I didn’t want to get caught up in a scandal, and when your— well, your father. When I met your father he gave me a warning.”_ )

Akechi held pressure against his arm. He’s done worse to himself accidentally, fucking with shadows that for some ungodly reason repel the nebulous concept of guns. He’d live. 

Unlike his mom.

( _“He looked me straight in the face and asked me if I wanted to go down as No-Good Tora’s secretary. It was the first time I’d heard it, the fall was going to happen next week, he told me, and I got scared." Hard to believe. "I should have said yes. We were in the stupid thing together. I had Saturday mornings off. It was great. I owed him more than what he got from me. But I was…” She smiled, rueful if Akechi had ever seen it, “gunshy.”_ )

Tearing the sheets that were already ruined was a nonissue. That’s what capes are made of.

( _“Probably could have pulled him out of the tailspin if I’d stayed, honestly.” She shoved her hands into her hair, and they caught on it. “I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out a receipt in my life. Did you know Shido didn’t pay taxes?”_ )

“Yes.”

The records teetered in his memory of home.

( _“Liar," but she was smiling still. “How is he…?”_ )

Not his dad. She knows that. “No-Good—”

( _Impatient. “You know what his name is.”_ )

Yoshida Toranosuke. Shido knows he’s running again, considering he ripped his whole platform and made it fascist-flavored. His mother knew that, since Shido knew that, but Akechi still said, “He’s giving his campaign speeches in the middle of the night.”

( _“Old man still can’t make a schedule, hunh....”_ )

She was stalling, and that was fine. By all logic, Akechi knew which part of the story was coming next anyway. “Can we skip me.”

( _“But you’re my favorite part._ ”)

Clocks were ticking. It would soon be time for him to kill his mother again, if he wasn’t careful, so Akechi didn’t say anything at all.

( _“Fine. The best part of my life happened. All that. I guess you remember it, hunh?”_ )

Well enough. Tick tock. She was winding down to the end, where he’d hear it was his fault— She ran because she had a kid, and she died because she— 

( _“Do you remember that person I met?”_ )

“Hunh?”

( _“For the record, before we get into it,” she said, “I knew he was following me. I thought he was just. Bad at talking to people. You know?”_ )

Akechi didn’t move. “He?”

_(“Yes, he. I regret to inform you that your mom is hot, Go-chan.”)_

“Ugh!”

( _She chuckled quietly to herself. “He was around all the time. You really don’t remember Ren?”_ )

The cognition banished to cleaning up messes, out of sight, SON OF A BITCH— “Yagami.”

( _“Yes! Exactly.”_ )

“Mom?”

( _“Yes?”_ )

“How did you die?"

( _"What do they say? That I fell off the roof?”_ )

Fell. Jumped. 

( _"Sweetheart. I'm so sorry."_ )

“Mom. How."

( _She sighed. “Strictly speaking, I did fall off of the roof, but I went up there myself, because we had—"_ )

The shape of the backyard came back to him suddenly. Don't cross under the ladder that was never put away. Shit. His mother was still talking.

( _"For the record, he hesitated." Okita Ayumi gave her wicked smile, touched a nail to the tip of her nose. It faded, fast, into something less. "I ... think you know how.”_ )

God damn it. Akechi sat up to face the empty room, committed to memory a conversation he never had, and went straight for the heart of the damn thing.

***

The cognition of Yagami Ren lives at the bottom of the ship, in the engine room. Nobody bothered to stop Akechi on his way there because he didn’t see anybody, passing between narrow walls like some kind of… nevermind.

God. What a heavy-handed metaphor. He should just go home.

( _They aren’t happy to see him like this._ )

But he has to be sure, first. The crawl through the vents was awful, and he smeared blood everywhere, but whatever. That’s someone else’s problem, much in the same way whatever was puddled in the middle of the room he’d arrived to at last was someone else’s problem. Even from the ceiling he could tell that it was hot. It stank. 

That should have been proof enough, but people always fall from favor around Shido. Yagami gets work done, and Yagami was there, crying into the mess smeared across the dark metal floor. Hunh. Akechi didn’t know him to cry, but maybe Shido did. Who cares. 

When Akechi pulled himself out of the vent (the fucking vent, like he's some kind of thief) his shoes made a sharp contact noise with the floor. Whatever the Hell was wrong with Ren that he was crying, it wasn’t enough to stop him from pointing a gun in the intruder's direction.

“Kid?” He blinked once over the sight, started crying again. “I thought you were dead!”

… Which means Shido thinks he’s dead, and the cognitive _he_ was the bloody heap in the middle of the room. Perfect. Akechi, alive and relatively well, could work with this.

( _He left as quickly as possible_.)

Yagami crossed the room, grabbed him, checked— “Oh, you’re the real one, too!”

( _He spat in Yagami’s face and left._ )

As if the real Akechi would be splattered on the floor and his cockroach of a cognition— Akechi abandoned the thought. Yagami sounded overjoyed, and in the kindest interpretation of the situation, forgot his strength. His fingers dug into the new wound, but there's so much blood on those hands, he probably didn’t even notice. Akechi couldn’t wrench his arms out of the grasp without starting a fight he wasn’t ready for. “Let me go.”

( _He left a remorseful heap behind, larger._ )

Magic is real and cognition is cheap but leaving two bodies on the floor of the engine room was a bad taste in the mouth and Yagami Ren was happy to see him.

A bad taste.

( _He started trying to activate the Metaverse app in his pocket..._ )

“You… didn’t hit the ground?” Yagami asked it as if it was something he’d been told but couldn’t believe. The window of opportunity closed on Akechi’s fingers, or his neck, or around his arms as Yagami Ren held him in place. He was being chastised over embraced. “You can’t just play with people like that.”

(... _He’d left Words with Friends open._ )

“My phone’s dead,” Akechi announced.

"Hunh?"

A dead phone means that Akechi is trapped in the Metaverse. "Means we're dead," he said.

It means he's stuck listening to the disgusting popcrack of a body reordering itself. Shido had found no Akechi splattered outside the Diet building. Lo, he is unkilled. Akechi didn’t watch the reanimation, swallowed his silent sorry to Nine.

That had also been Yagami’s fault, come to think of it.

This close, pinned in place, Akechi could see Yagami's face up close. Knowing as much as he does about scars, crisscrossing him unevenly where he didn't have enough chocolate syrup to fix them, something had hit Yagami hard to make that, right in the center of his face. Broken his nose, definitely, but split it open, too, a clump of shame twisting upwards from the bottom like he'd gotten hit hard with something… improvised… 

He'd hesitated. It had been on his face the whole God damn time. 

“Hey mom!” The real Akechi said, to the other side of the room.

Yagami dropped him, took a step back. “Yumi? Where?”

This would buy Akechi a couple of seconds but save him no blood, because when Yagami turned to search, he was met with naked hands and teeth that were suddenly upon him. The Cleaner didn’t even try to unhesitate, failed in the absolute to shoot Ayumi’s son so recently returned from the dead. Shido must think Yagami Ren a coward.

Objectively, he should have been running, but Akechi was fixed by a thought— the first person to discover a corpse is the one who put it there. Fuck! Akechi couldn't force words out, the thought lay unfinished.

Meanwhile, the Akechi that wasn’t him tore through Yagami Ren like tissue paper— with his hands, pops of bloody ozone. Shido doesn't know about Loki. Robin Hood. This is how Shido thinks Akechi kills people. 

Wrong. Different. Bad.

Magic dripped down Akechi's arm. He saw himself hunched over— gross. Oh fuck no oh God. Gross! Gross! 

"Are you going to do it?" The other one asked, not looking up from the ugly work finished. The ground hadn't been kind to him, and he was unkind in turn. "Or are you standing there?"

Akechi swallowed the distasteful joke about killing himself. Loki did not come to his aid.

"Think you can even try?"

Robin Hood refused his call. Akechi put on a brave face. What was the worst thing that could happen? _Dying_?

Akechi really didn't want to die.

The yellow eyes bored into him. "Then come."

***

Akechi woke up, in the quiet of the yard. The gentle blue grass still felt the same against his face. It all barely hurt anymore, ached like a loss. This was almost nice. He waited for the old man to say something. Hoped the old man would say anything, but the quiet of the yard persisted, past the intermittent tapping of… what was that sound?

Akechi sat up. There was no one else here, the gallows empty. He did not turn around. What happened to Joker this time, if the common truth is that—

"I'm sorry," Akechi said. He didn't want to think about it. Fuck thinking about it. "I'm sorry?"

That's how Joker says it, a question, a prompt, never when he should, come to think of it. Not right. No response. Try again.

If Akechi were on TV he'd say, _I apologize, My mistake, Pardon me,_ not, I apologize for my mistake, pardon me, please, and even though these all stick around his throat— in the emptiness of the yard, Akechi is not executed. 

"I'm sorry…"

It was all he could say. The gallows beckoned him, and Akechi came to an unsteady footing. Pain wasn't specific enough to remind him of what had happened anymore, so he didn't pay attention, struggled to the scaffold with shreds of dignity in his dripping fists. The dust rallied around his feet, encouraging him forward.

There was a problem, Akechi realized about halfway there, but he wouldn't let it stop him. It was good that nobody was around to see him struggle, how difficult it was to get up on a platform so tall— Christ, was it always this far off the ground, twice as tall as him? It can't have been but it is now. The smooth wood resisted his grip, made even worse by the state of his hands. This was new, carefully-made. A prison in itself. 

He was too beaten up for this. Not the elegant holes a different Loki had punched in him at all.

Begging the question, of course. Why not?

Akechi managed, somehow. He fought his way to center stage and— there it was, big now. Huge, unmissable, scratched straight into the hardwood. How had he not seen it before?

_LOOK UP._

Of course the old man still taunts him. He isn't even here, but he's still egging Akechi on, _face the truth, face the consequences,_ and the prison loomed on the horizon in front of him.

He could do it. Look up. But there would be no one to help him, this time, and even the memory of it filled him with… 

Paint. A drip of paint hit the hardwood with a tap. He'd sat around Kitagawa enough, Akechi _knows_ it's the stench of paint without having to move. Another spot made contact (tap!) and halved the distance. Thick yellow paint.

When it hits his hair, the next time, he learns that paint feels almost exactly like blood. "Jesus!"

"Not quite."

It came from above him. Akechi looked up to see the stars above the yard, twinkling as if they were alive, eyes in the deep blue of the sky.

"Hello?" Akechi asked them. He saw the paint flung at him with purpose, this time, from the last empty spot above. There was a man, not old, not young. Just a man, standing on top of the gallows. His twisted mouth was the easiest part to see against the dark of the blankness he was up against. The rest of his outfit was black, including his glasses. He spun the paintbrush in his hand.

"Do you mind?"

Droplets showered down gently. Akechi blinked, they were gone. "I—"

"No. You don't." He turned away again, to his work. "Can't mind anything. You're dead."

"I—"

"You have died. Some people think the dead are supposed to be quiet. Don't you? 'Course you don't. You don't think." The paintbrush hovered close to its target, thoughtful, "You… have… died."

The condescension hit Akechi like a sudden wave, overwhelming and hot. He grit the words out, pushed them through his clenched teeth. "I've noticed! I'm afraid I'm still here!" 

This was hilariously regressive. When was the last time Akechi had actually been pissed about that? If he had it in him to backslide further, he might actually have laughed. 

The painter thought it was funny, at least, angling so Akechi could see he was smiling. "You are afraid. You are still here." Another bit of paint slid off the brush, missed Akechi by half an inch only because he dodged it. "Which means you’re still there, too, of course. It sticks."

"... Sticks?"

"Yeah," said the painter, rubbing his fingers against his thumb in a familiar way, "I think that's the word. Sticks."

It doesn't stick, that's the problem, but Akechi was interrupted by boots hitting the wood of the platform. The man wasn't impressive, up close like this— scruffy, long hair long coat, glasses of a liar. He wasn't even tall enough to loom over Akechi, and yet, Akechi was silenced.

"How many friends do you have?" he asked.

Akechi pictured last time, the crowd. How many were there?

"No."

"No?"

"Not what I'm talking about, and I'm also not the one to ask even if that was how I meant it. Nameless knows. I don't." The man scratched the side of his face. He was wearing fingerless gloves, Akechi couldn't decide whether that was ridiculous enough to be insulting, "You've got bigger problems than my looks."

" _Are you reading my thoughts?_ "

"Directly off your face. You're awful."

Akechi rubbed at his eye, just to have hands between him and the man. Fuck this. "Can the old man do that."

"Dunno." The heavy boots made heavy sounds as the painter paced around, staring up from where he’d come from. "Never could tell."

God damn it. A pause stretched. Akechi could almost, for a moment, pretend this was normal. Then the scratching noise started.

"I could make you something."

The conversational jump threw Akechi off his balance. He played into it, sat down in the puddle he'd been dripping into the wood, and watched. The painter, if he noticed, didn’t even pause.

"I could make you many things.” The sound was coming from what he was doing with his hands, too quick for Akechi to parse, “Pictures of pain. Loss. Human suffering."

"I know that." Akechi said. It wasn't right. He knows _those_ , individually, together they're despair. Emptiness. A different list.

The painter snorted. "Demon."

“What?”

Scritch scratch scritch. A sound that didn’t stop, didn’t slow.

“I called you a demon.”

"Excuse me?"

"I won't." He turned again in his pacing path, a sweeping gesture that blew out his coat. "Not if you're doing this to them on purpose."

Scratch.

"To _them_?"

"Your transitive state is yours alone. They claim you."

Scritch.

"They?"

"Every time they claim you and you've abandoned them.” Scratch. “You abandon them."

A statement, an accusation. " _Me!?_ "

“Who else?” Suddenly they were face to face, the man leaning down quiet, “Unless you are not yourself.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you, Sorry?” The painter tilted his head in one direction, and then the other. This was not eye contact, but Akechi could feel himself stared at, so he tracked the lenses as they moved, “No, I don’t think you are. Who are you?”

“I’m… Goro.” He was sure about that much, hesitated to go further while the painter was so close to him. 

“And who are you, Goro?”

The man lost interest in his face, but stayed close enough to observe. There were ways to understand the question, each new approach less certain than the last. He prefered to not be wrong. “Loki. Robin Hood.”

The scratching started again, carefully angled away from Akechi’s gaze. “No.”

“No?”

“Can’t you tell?”

Scratch. The puddle of blood under Akechi was strange, now, the whisperings of chaos and law lost to him. But, inert? No. “I have—” He has what. _Magic?_ He destroyed the desk. He has a persona. He has— Scratch scratch scratch.

“Certainly. You have.”

“Can you quit that?” Akechi waved his hands, as if to dispel prying eyes, “It’s distracting.”

“I could.” The painter returned to looking up, searching the sky with his thumb stuck out in front of him, “But then you’d lie.”

Fuck you.

“Awful.”

Akechi gave fleeting, fragmented wishes to himself. Introspecting with an audience was too much, but he had to come up with some kind of answer if he’d be allowed to leave.

“Nothing keeps you here.”

Akechi rolled his eyes.

“You are aware that it’s you, are you not?” The man dusted off his shoulders as if something were there, “All of this. Well.”

The smartass retort Akechi had been trying not to focus on tucked itself away again. “Well?”

“There is a single common cognition that isn’t yours. Exactly one cheat. But that’s it.”

“And… what is that.”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me something.” The painter touched the end of his paintbrush— it was the paintbrush again in his hand— to his face, smudged yellow anyway by the paint on the handle. “Now. I don’t normally get to do this, but you need help on your journey.”

“That’s not a—”

“Don’t interrupt me, I’m not finished. How long,” he asked this while moving, coming to a stop standing directly under the gallows, “do you intend to torture the people who love you?”

Stuck in Akechi’s chest, _I don’t love anybody—_

“Irrelevant.” The light from the painted stars reflected hard off the dark glasses. “Even if you weren’t lying.”

— a lie. 

“I don’t care. This is a question about them.”

“Them?” The question was disingenuous, teeming with something that Akechi didn’t need to be told was reluctance. Fear, even. _It sticks,_ he was told. He knew this already. Time has decided to grind down into a flat circle before it disappears into nothing at all, and it was… 

“Wrong.” 

Suddenly the man was gone, climbing back to his perch. It was taller than Akechi had realized, he couldn’t see the top against the sky without looking for it.

Had the sky always been so... “Where are you going?”

“To work.” (Akechi waited for the sting of a clever punch, but it did not come.) “What is your answer?” 

An answer was that it’s their fault. Had he asked them to get attached? Something else he hadn’t been annoyed about in a while, another thing that feels hollow in his hands. Can’t say that. Can’t make himself say that, it crumbled to ashes in his mouth. Okay. Maybe it was his fault, for… a drip hit the wood, though Akechi couldn’t see the painter. Maybe it was his fault, for not being honest.

About what.

The painter responded in a whiny mimic, “About what?”

“Can you stop it?”

“They remember being close to you, most of them.”

“Shut up!” 

“I guess I should have expected you to be dense.”

Akechi didn’t know and he didn’t want to know.

A hum from above, and something fell into Akechi’s lap. A picture, the size of his palm perhaps, and on it was Makoto, looking like nothing at all. The emptiness in her painted eyes ached. PRIESTESS. 

“What the Hell!”

Two more, STAR and DEVIL, followed the first. He’d never seen Togo Hifumi look so angry. He’d only seen Ren that distraught once.

“You often go missing, I’ve noticed,” said the painter simply, dropping more of the things onto him. LOVERS again in tears. CHARIOT, half-sketched and half-torn, EMPEROR, blotted out, HERMIT, a single cross through her face. Another one. TEMPERANCE collapsed on the ground. “Did you even think of telling her?”

Akechi stared hard. It was Becky, collapsed on the ground, but which ground? When, where, and would she get— “Did you ever stop to consider that other people have lives?” The painter tossed another one at him, with purpose. "Deaths."

HIEROPHANT. She was dead, spread out in a black stain on the street. Akechi threw it from him, but he thought of her dying again, laughing in the explosion of stained glass, RESEARCH LAB - CATHEDRAL - ISSHIKI WAKABA. Once had been enough. He looked up to say so, but instead, Akechi saw the painter's closed fist. “Hello?” It flicked open, fingertips an inch from his nose. "Ah!" 

Confetti rained down on him. He didn't need to see to know what it was. MAGICIAN. EMPRESS. The other half of Sakamoto's face, too, stared back at him from the fragmented floor when Akechi tried to shake out his hair. "Okay! I get it!"

"What is done is done and can’t be undone.”

Cards hit the back of his head. A deck, at least, all Jokers. FOOL, FOOL, FOOL, in various states of disarray. One of the darkdrawn sketches walked happily off a cliff, a detailed portrait slumped over the interrogation room table, blurry concept of dinner served, quickly buried under bullshit Akechi couldn’t even place but had obviously done, if it was being thrown in his face on— God, were these supposed to be tarot cards? 

Another one or two touched Akechi on their way to the floor— they were _being drawn_ — “Do you have some kind of GOD DAMN point?”

“Yeah.” Boots, falling heavy. Why’d he climb up there if he was gonna come back, “I’m breaking rules.”

Akechi could see the painter’s hands, gathering up everything he’d sent down before him. 

“What are you trying to say.”

“This?” The hands, still in Akechi’s field of vision, waved the cards, “Not allowed. We’re supposed to be subtle. Oblique. All that bullshit. The old man’s gonna have my ass, actually.”

“You know th—”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, kid.” The cards shuffled, idly. Cut, recut, and cut again. “He always says we can’t _interfere._ ”

“We?”

“Irrelevant. But, when it comes to humans, wildcards especially? I’m supposed to keep my fat mouth shut about the secrets of the soul.”

“But?”

Akechi looked up just a little, the painter was smiling. “But fuck that. I think he forgot something real important, and that’s why I’m hitting you with this little intervention.”

_Little._ “What’d he forget.”

“I used to be human once.” (If he spluttered, the man ignored Akechi.) “It’s been a while. A long while. But I know how it is to not know a damn thing. So I ask you again, do you like hurting other people?”

"No."

"Then how long are you going to do it?"

How long, how long. “I don’t know.”

“There’s an honest answer.”

Akechi smiled back.

“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but at least you’re honest about it. Now, I have a favor to ask you.”

“Wait, I answered you! What’s the cheat?”

“Yeah. I’m getting to it.” The man tucked the cards away into a pocket. “I need you to stay alive, is what I need.”

“What?”

“This little friendship romp only lasted a blink. Don’t be an idiot. I need time.”

“Time for what?”

“To finish cheating.” The painter pointed up, and when Akechi looked, really, he could see it, the thinnest sliver that didn’t tell him anything.

“Hey!”

The painter had already begun his return trip to the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (drumrolls)
> 
> we're closing in on endgame and we've pretty much caught up to the bits ive written. there's maybe two chapters left-- if the next update is a little late, pwease be nice to me


	7. IN WHICH HUMANS EXIST

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Akechi's super normal new game, part one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> is this everything i wanted to post? no. is it the day i usually update? no. 
> 
> did i miss you? absolutely

April 1st. He wasn’t going to fuck this up.

***

April 4th. He wasn't. This was going to be normal.

***

A cry caught his attention on his way home, because of course it did. He'd left the office late (thanks, Niijima-san) and now he was gonna get stabbed for not ignoring a sound that was growing into... a wail. Akechi adjusted his scarf.

It wasn't danger. It was distress. The woman— it was a woman, who was wailing at the station in the middle of the evening— was crying. Nobody would die from that, he was okay to catch his train and go home, pretend he hadn't heard it at all. Akechi forced himself to take even steps. Maybe he could get away with it just onc—

"Justice! Justice, where are you! I know you’re here!"

Damn.

( _There were enough people here, the crowd flowed around her with an ignorant bend._ )

Jesus Christ, and he knows who's calling him, too. If he sees her, he sees her, and that will be that. Moving only his eyes he searched for her cloud of hair, greasy with tears, just like it was on the train. She was easy to spot, and spotted him back in return.

"Just— ah!"

She fell down forward, tripped over her sandals. The crowd kept its indifferent ebb, too thick for him to push past even if he’d been trying harder. Someone else approached from the other side like a master of tides. The older man helped the woman up, and Akechi could smell the arcanae on them from here— two of them, two of them, WHEEL OF FORTUNE and—

Hm.

“Justice!” she called to him, holding her hands out as if Akechi would rush to take them. In the little eddy of human traffic, he sauntered. It seemed like the thing to do, since running was out of the question. 

The second he entered conversation distance, though, “There’s blood on your face.”

Akechi said it automatically, and just as mechanically, the woman checked. She touched at it— dry, as if she’d taken this fall hours ago and not just now. Her fingers caught on its flakiness, but there was no acknowledgement of it in her expression. Old wound, irrelevant.

Had she been bleeding now, there would be blood in her eye. She can't have not noticed it…

“Young man,” said the older man, and the words prickled on Akechi’s skin like daywarmth, “Is that any way—” ( _He was being chastised again, Akechi pinched the bridge of his nose before the question could even terminate, “— to talk to a lady?”_ )

God, did he not want to hear it. Akechi looked straight at him, and he looked at Akechi. Yoshida Toranosuke faltered into silence.

“Don’t do that!”

Startled, they looked at the woman instead of each other.

“Miss,” hazarded No-Good Tora, hands hovering at his sides, “Are you alright?”

( _Chihaya tried to step back but tumbled backwards on her ass this time._ )

“I do not! Stop it!”

Akechi pinched the bridge of his nose with his gloved hand to stop himself from swearing in public. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re just making fun of me now!” Chihaya (who?) picked up one of her feet but put it right back down, aborting the step. She seemed troubled by the world, and bitter tears lurked in her eyes. She picked up her foot, and put it down. Again.

“Uh, son?” 

Akechi winced. Tora hadn’t relaxed from his position, seemingly ready to jump between Akechi and whoever the Hell this woman turned out to be. What purpose that would serve was beyond Akechi. He realized he hadn’t responded. “Hm?”

“Do you know her…?”

Ah, the careful craftings of a politician. Who was he concerned for, here? The movement of his eyes between them betrayed only the presence of an opinion.

( _She calls a celebrity by a nickname. He'd miss his train if he didn't leave them now_.)

“Chihaya,” Akechi said, voice as neutral as he could make it, “It’s time to go.”

“... Okay!"

She bounded the step and a half to Akechi, sunny smile sticking Tora exactly where he was. That's it. SUN. 

( _"If you'll excuse us?"_

 _Akechi asked a question before he could think better of it. He’d been recognized, and the answer would be—_ )

"If you'll excuse us."

"... Of course. Get home safely."

They left him standing alone.

***

On the train, she clung to his arm. Akechi asked her to stop, was summarily ignored— for some reason he had the feeling he was lucky, like she’d be hugging him if she thought she could get away with it. 

“Do you mind?” he asked again, perhaps a touch more exasperated than the last time. It was late. There was a lot of room for her to not be in his space.

“Honest yes.”

He should not ask stupid questions. “Why.”

“Because you keep ending the world,” (Akechi felt the press of her nails into the fabric of his blazer) “and I hate it.”

Around them, the subway car rattled. Chihaya was wearing a summer dress.

“Yeah."

“You keep doing it.”

“I have enough…” God damn it, already he has to mutilate language, “... of a morality chain, thank you.”

“A what?”

With his free hand, Akechi went to touch at his neck, but found something in the way. Why was he wearing a scarf in April. “Why are you here.”

One of her hands unwrapped him his elbow, and from the pocket of her strange purple summer dress she produced a deck of cards.

“Uh-hunh?”

“Actually,” she replaced it, smoothly grabbing Akechi with both hands again, “this is our stop.”

“No it isn—”

With a surprising strength she yanked him off the train and into the night. 

***

He’d never been to this… ‘restaurant’, because it was definitely a bar in the red light district. The woman (Lala, Chihaya had called her) didn’t seem impressed with him. Nobody seemed very impressed with him anymore. The Second Detective Prince is dead, long live the first one.

Akechi had been summarily dumped at the corner table to wait.

Allll the way on the other side of the establishment, Chihaya and Lala argued with each other. They weren’t even gesturing in his direction, much less looking… 

He pretended to check his messages, on a phone that wasn't dead yet. With nothing so gracious as an apology, Akechi took the Metaverse home.

***

A fistful of embarrassing days passed. It took him until that long to gather up the courage to send the pitiful amount of text he’d typed out. **Do you have this number?**

He wanted the answer to be no, but if she didn’t, she’d Google it.

_What do you want, Goro._

Damn. Akechi hadn’t planned to get this far.

**I’m sorry.**

( _She’d seen him kill the good CEO in cold blood, could probably fill in the blanks incorrectly with what she knew to be true. Fuck off, she said._ )

( _She didn’t care. He wasn’t worth it._ )

( _She’d done the math, obsessively. The numbers told it clearer than he could._ )

 _I know,_ she said.

***

Days passed, between his gentle balance of work, school, and avoiding Chihaya-who-never-introduced-herself. His phone buzzed. It was Takamaki, somehow, but when or where she’d obtained his number escaped him.

_He gets here tomorrow..._

**Yeah.**

_We’re having a meeting._

Of course they are. Akechi had tried that one, once, and the odds looked bad.

( _"It's risky," he said._ )

The moment passed.

_What did you say to Futaba?_

**Sorry?**

_What did you say to Futaba?_

**No. I said sorry. Why do you ask?**

_Because I think you should see her._

***

He skipped out on the whole thing.

***

April 20th, night. Akechi had been very careful to wear gloves all month, like normal, but even still, Yagami was in his kitchen when he dragged himself over the threshold.

“Heya, kid.”

Akechi limped up to one of the chairs around the kitchen island, that for the equivalent of years had been stowed away in God-knows-where. He reached down, dug at the cupboard next to his leg for one of the bottles there.

"Whatup?"

Ren, for his part, had already rifled through the fridge, the crumb remains of whatever paltry sandwich he'd been able to make dusting the corner of the island closest to him. In a second, he'd notice Akechi beat to Metaverse shit, and he was already winding up for some smartass comment.

(" _Get your ass kicked or something?"_ )

It turns out traipsing around Mementos is made incredibly difficult when your inner demons are on strike and will not beat things into submission, but he wasn’t going to dignify the question. Akechi unscrewed the lid from the bottle, started scratching at the seal. It was sufficient enough to distract Ren, "Whatcha got there?"

Chocolate syrup, obviously. Stupid question. "Was my mother your maid?"

"I— what?"

"Did she clean up after you? Was. My mother." He replaced the cap, because despite everything he isn't an animal, "Your maid."

"No? What the fuck?" ( _He was too startled to be honest, focused his guilt into one hand clutching the edge of the island, "Kid, what the Hell are you talking about?"_ )

Yagami's shoulders locked. Definitely got him, Akechi thought, as he watched him remember how to move. Ren twitched, turned his face forward. There it was. The scar she'd given him, staring out the whole time. Years.

( _"You killed her?"_ )

"You killed her."

A statement of fact. Another statement of fact, Yagami's eyes slid towards the tiny window over the sink. He thought he could make it, but that would end messy if he tried. Plus, that window doesn't open anyway.

"Stop me if I'm wrong, please, you killed my mother and you burned my house down."

The words felt odd around the tooth he was missing, now, left side in the back. He'd deal with that later— leg wound first. With his thumb, Akechi flicked the cap open, pondered the now-open bottle of chocolate syrup in his hands. 

Yagami was sweating. No bullets yet. There wouldn’t be, if he didn’t let up, so Akechi said, “And then, you called the school.”

Yagami swallowed heavily, didn’t answer. It would almost be fun, backing Ren into this corner, if Akechi didn’t have to think about these specific words coming out of his mouth. Around here, there must be a ledge, and again, Akechi pushed.

“You killed my mom, you burned my house down, and you somehow had the wherewithal after all of that to call the school. My _mom._ ”

The air between them became taught. Someone would need to start bleeding worse than the slow leak out of Akechi's leg to fix it, unless— 

“... Well.”

Yagami Ren opened his mouth, and all he had to say was _well._ That wasn’t good enough, he struck, faster.

"What'd she hit you with, anyway."

Akechi didn't want to think about it as Yagami looked off to his right-hand side. He could almost see it, Ayumi coming at him with, "The clock."

( _She’d whiffed him, nearly missed the mark entirely._ )

"The _clock_?" In the memory of his mother's room, there wasn't another one...

"The little. You know. The uh, the thing." Yagami shoved his hands deep in his pockets, with the soda and the gun. "The Thinker."

( _She’d pulled back, but even so. The barest point of contact was enough to turn the head in her hands, and her moment of pause was marked. "I think it's 2:45."_ )

… besides the statue from the bedside table that didn't look like a clock at all, and now he has to think about Yagami Ren in his mother's room. Disgusting. The Thinker only announced time, he must have heard it when it came crashing at him, unless he knew some other way. Don't think about that one too hard. Gross, but it's all so funny, isn't it?

So little is set in stone. 

Yagami jumped when Akechi started laughing— that was the starter pistol, the invitation to fucking _leave_ , but oh. Akechi should have known by now the killer would hesitate. What, was he worried? _Now?_

( _To break the tension, if not Akechi’s fit, Yagami told the truth._

_“I called the school first.”_ )

Fuck it. Akechi upended the bottle into his mouth, felt the sugar sliding down his throat do nothing that couldn't be described as 'restoring HP'. He turned a stained smile on Yagami after the moment, the eternity. “Dude, what the Hell.”

That did it. Yagami left without another word.

***

April 27th, the consequences of his actions came to pass. He could file paperwork all he liked, but because he’d been avoiding the office, he was sent a chauffeur. Becky’s third job, performed with all the unenthusiasm of someone with three jobs, two of them under Shido’s employ.

Somehow she was outdoing even him and was still broke. Akechi walked out of the elevator considering this math until he was stopped— 

( _“Excuse me, but your friend can’t park there.”_ )

— by a look. The receptionist’s face, across the lobby, betrayed his intention to tell Akechi something about his friend ‘parking illegally again’, but by all rights, that’s his resident spot, and he had somewhere to be. A newsworthy smile avoided the confrontation, and money could probably resolve it later either way. Bribes and tickets pay the same.

She’d been looking out the windshield for him, and brightened when he opened the door.

“You know philosophy?”

Becky’s shitty little car smelled like cherry air freshener even though there was a lemon one in the cupholder. He buckled his seatbelt before she asked him to. “Yes. Why?”

The actual answer was ‘kind of’, which is everybody’s actual answer except for Becky’s. A lecture was barreling straight towards him.

"Great. Okay.” She put the car in reverse, the official start of the Question Game, “You know what I hate?"

"No. What do you hate, how's your day."

"Rene Descartes. Same old. And you? Have you eaten?"

She'd picked a direction to drive in, regardless of his answer, and it was something Akechi liked about her. Not that he’d lie. "I think, therefore I am hungry."

"... Real cute.” 

The glare she gave him from the corner of her eye was the deadliest thing he'd seen this month. She’d asked him two questions, but he’d gotten wrapped up in the joke. Akechi smiled, with all his teeth except the one that was still gone.

“Oh, I’m fine. Did you wanna go somewhere? Also, what did he do now."

“Sure. Sushi." Becky paused to focus on the U-turn she had to make. It wasn’t a question— it should have been, in April, a careful gauge of whether he’d like it or not. It was April, but she already knew she didn’t have to ask that. “Also,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about the wax ball.”

Akechi suppressed the noise that tried to rise in the back of his throat. He didn’t know that one.

“It’s a thought experiment, though I suppose you could just perform it in real life. The premise is just, questionable at best. At least with the Ship of Theseus you have half a philosophical leg to stand on. Locke’s socks, if you insist on being stupid about it in a different dimension.”

He oriented himself as best he could, rolled down the window just for something to do. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. But Descartes just looks down from his mountain of unreadable texts and says someshhthing like, _oh the only thing that is certain is change,_ entirely because wax can melt and that doesn’t make it not wax.”

Akechi blinked. Becky was a good driver, though, and didn’t see it. “Uh-hunh?”

“Exactly. I’m just...”

Pretending to understand was a mistake. At this rate she would lapse into French.

***

He got caught on the train, trying to conjure up a literature essay he hadn’t written before. Chihaya stared intently at his mouth. "You won't fix it like that."

Idly, Akechi snapped into another section of Kitkat. If he was trying to grow anything, it was an idea. Would it be tasteless to write the essay about Akechi Kogoro, at last? 

"It's not heavy duty enough. You need—" She tugged gently on her hair, tilting her head. "I don't know. Twizzlers." 

Twizzlers… Maybe if she paid for them, but Chihaya was looking elsewhere from his face when she said, "I like the black ones. I'll wait on the platform for you."

 _Black licorice._ As if Akechi would be caught dead— now _that_ would be something that could kill him, a risk he’s not willing to take. Instead, he supplied from his pocket a compromise.

"If I give you this, will you leave me alone?"

He tossed it to her before she could refuse. She was faster than he thought she’d be, caught it easily despite the deck she’d been shuffling in both hands a second before. He’d have to remember her reflexes, next time he needed a real distraction. 

Then again, there was the light in her eyes when she realized what it was. A Kitkat, but.

"Oh! The corn one! How did you know?"

Of course. "You're a hick too."

( _“I’m NOT,” Joker bumped into Akechi from the other side, all threat and promise and suppressed accent, “a HICK.”_

 _There was no opportunity to beg to differ,_ )

“Of fucking course!” The women behind Chihaya in the car flinched at her outburst, like she was going to throw the card in her hand at them, but her eyes were fixed on the empty space over Akechi's shoulder. “I should have known! Fuck!”

She whirled, stormed through the crowd as if they weren’t there. He could write his essay on narrative expectation if he tried, but that already felt a little old hat.

***

> _regina: Hey?_ Akechi idly set another furnace out of his inventory. They’d need it soon, if this base was going to get off the ground.

> _jay: yes?_

Because he was in a menu, he could hear that Makoto had stopped building.

> _regina: What are we doing?_

The answer, of course, was what they always did, no matter what. Play stupid video games with their stupid psydonyms like they were stupid twelve year olds again, when they didn’t know they knew each other and could overshare about how they were the playthings of fate with wild abandon.

Not that they aren’t. Not that they’re capable of shutting up, anyway. But still.

How different it was, years ago. A crafting table, conjured from nothing and wood, sat neatly in front of him now. He didn’t have anything to make, or anything different to say, but it was his turn.

> _jay: minecraft. want to play something else?_

She didn’t.

***

“Can I ask you what you think you’re doing?”

May. He’d started taking different trains, but not well enough to avoid Chihaya. “Going to work.”

It was 5:35 in the May morning, already sweltering, but she still sat rubbing elbows with him. Akechi didn’t have the energy to glare.

“You aren’t working,” she said.

“I am. I get paid and everything.” Not technically a lie, Niijima Sae compensates him in lunches at least as much as stilted attempts at life lessons, “Promise.”

“No, you’re _NOT._ ”

From nowhere the cards found her hands, and Akechi noticed how dirty they were, covered in muck like she’d lost something in a gutter.

( _The cul—_ )

“Can you SHUT UP,” The cards clashed against themselves, cutting a shuffle Akechi wasn’t quite sure should be working, “I’m busy.”

“I didn—”

“Shut it! God!!” They cut, cut, and cut again. “I can’t fuckin' believe you’re doing this.”

“What.”

Not enough energy for politeness, much less a question.

“I painted my cards _myself_ , you little jerkass, ‘n’ya should be _grateful—_ ” She turned a card out, cut herself off with a sharp breath. “I’m sorry.”

“No, what were you saying?"

“Really. I am, so sorry.”

“Chihaya.”

“You know my name.” She’d never introduced herself. Akechi scratched the back of his head, which was the wrong way to respond if her face was anything to go by. “Why am I the godblessed messenger if you know my name, Justice?”

Her eyes narrowed, but her mouth didn't move.

( _Her eyes narrowed._ “ _Aren’t you psychic enough?”_ )

No. No, no, no.

“Obviously not,” she said, curiously soft. The tarot card she drew was handed to him face-down, with the gentle insistence of panic having rubbed away the edges on the back. “Look.”

 _THE HANGED MAN,_ Akechi saw, inkpaint wet enough to slick his glove. It was himself, almost unrecognizable in a haze of red, with… his beloved boss, holding him up by the ankle. Niijima's other hand covered her mouth. Tears streamed down her face. Tears streamed up her face. Was she laughing or crying?

He recognized it, in theory.

"These aren't my cards."

That was the sound of misery, and the moment Akechi passed the card back, she tore it in half. He didn't have to guess that another one would show up in her pocket, or between the hands— the painter was making an inelegant mockery of them both. He sighed, a miserable thing in that it wasn't miserable at all. 

“I guess I’m not going to work.” 

***

The world was conspiring against him, Akechi decided, when he walked into his apartment building and found the shut-in in the lobby. She, unfortunately, had seen him first, and called out, "You're avoiding me!"

He started a hurry towards the elevator— no. Bad idea, she gets along with them too well. 

Instead, Akechi pivoted on his foot and went towards the stairs, or tried to. The thing about her is she's short, and managed to get in front of him in her stupid clunky boots, shaking like a leaf with her arms out to stop him.

Fuck it. He can come back later. Akechi spun further on his heel, back to the way he came.

"H— hey! Stop!"

No. The rest of them were either right outside or already upstairs, if they hadn't split up to do both, and he'd have to deal with it now.

( _If Kitagawa were in the building— He'd be here.)_

A trap.

Akechi paused, sent out a lash of the magic that he still had. There was nobody hiding in the lobby, nothing to be unleashed but the nervous rushing behind him. He reigned in the Call before it could catch her and…

She caught him with her persona, weird tentacles wrapped around his middle, except she hadn't done that at all. Akechi stumbled when it slammed into his back, except _it_ was _her_ , with her human arms locked together, stopping him in exact place.

He must have been too late. Chaos got her.

"Wait!"

As if he had a choice. The edge of something dug into his back. He could see both of her hands. It couldn't be a knife.

"Listen to me…!" She wears glasses, pressed into him with the words from her mouth. Akechi, again, didn't have the luxury of disobeying— not leaving, much less moving. She said, quietly, "Why are you doing this…"

A good question— the answers clamored, overlapped in his mind, but none of them were the end of the conversation. She wasn't going to let him go, now that she had him, so it wouldn't make a difference what he said.

He said nothing.

"You're like this."

That was a mutter Akechi couldn't dare nor bother to be insulted by. Instead, he was suddenly struck by the profound emptiness of the lobby. No receptionist, no doorman, just Akechi squinting outside past his own reflection in the glass doors.

A car passed by, southbound. Akechi continued to say nothing.

"Hey." She squeezed him, gently, which kept him still despite her shaking. "Look."

Akechi was looking. A white station wagon passed by, southbound.

"I'm not gonna pretend like I'm not fucked up, okay?"

It wouldn't have fooled him anyway. Isshiki Wakaba had told him enough about her daughter over their friendship— if he could call it that, now that she's dead and he killed her and almost her daughter too. 

She tightened her hold again, got a little bit closer. "But it isn't you."

What's that—

"Shido… Your… Our… He made you do it."

He should have expected her to know, but Akechi felt himself lock up. “Who told you that?"

“Does it matter? I know enough,” she said, quickly, like he'd interrupt her, “and I think— I, I think that—”

She dissolved into shaking, holding him tight enough to hurt. A southbound station wagon passed the door again, a great white shark out again for Akechi’s blood, as if it hasn’t had enough.

( _The deck frowned, spat WHEEL OF FORTUNE: Out of his favor._ )

“IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

She yelled it. She yelled it like it would make a difference were she quiet, or if she hesitated, and in the blank moment after Akechi had to think. Were he to run, traffic would find him, but the threat of death did not outright trump the desire to get the fuck out. His instincts had to bicker it out. There would be meantime.

In that meantime, he had to fight her. “Don’t be stupid.” Akechi clenched his jaw so hard it hurt, “Don’t be stupid!”

“ _You_ don’t be stupid!” Her hands were busy. She headbutted him in the spine.

“Ow! Jesus!”

"I know who killed my mom—"

( _Isshiki Wakaba stood in the crumbling cathedral, the cognitions of children gathered around her,_ )

"— a-a-and I know. That put me in a bad place."

( _Akechi watched himself fear, take as big a fistful of her labcoat-tails as the filthy Strega orphans had, yellow eyes filled with tears._

 _They were surrounding her._ )

"I think you know by now…"

She trailed off, like she knew that Akechi was too much of a coward to ever save her. Killing another Isshiki? Out of the question. Burning the paperwork that Niijima had shown him, primed to wrench the girl from Sakura Sojiro's hands as a threat— why hadn't he ever done that?

( _"I didn't know. I swear to God I didn't."_

 _He didn't mean to, but he forced the words out like the excuse alone would unkill Wakaba._ )

Her hands dropped from around him. The feeling of her persona taking their place was like a birdcage descending— nothing smaller, nothing more skintight than that. He could finish the stride he'd been the middle of in if he tried, but not more, so he didn't try.

A rush of air told Akechi that she crouched behind him, where she had stood. 

They stayed like that, for a moment.

Don't turn around. Don't turn around.

"Turn around."

Quiet. She stood. Akechi couldn't.

"Do it!"

It was a command, now. Still, he hesitated.

( _He thought the palace would just go away if there wasn't anyone to run it._ )

Avoiding the Metaverse meant Akechi was rusty. She managed to dodge under his right side, get in front of him with a vengeance— and, more importantly, get what she wanted. Now that she was there, he couldn't take his eyes off her. Most importantly, he couldn't lie to her face. "You look like shit."

She gave him the long glare of someone who didn't sleep last night. "You know what? Yeah. I do." She pulled her hands through the ends of her hair. "But guess what."

Oh, fuck.

"I saiiiid guess."

It's a trap. She edged closer, a crooked smile pasted over her face.

" _I_ guess," she said, quietly for as loud as she'd been, "it runs in the family, doesn't it, bro?"

It took everything in Akechi to hold his ground. "How—”

"It doesn't matter!" Whatever she was trying to do, spreading her arms out like that, was lost on him. "Our dad sucks! Our dad is the worst! He's bad and awful and I hate him so much for what he did to..."

(Akechi held his breath.)

" ... us! Joker and me and you and fucking, Japan? And— Goddamn it—" 

To him?

She lunged, gathered him into a hug again. He'd seen her coming, picked up his arms out of gremlin reach, and they hovered awkwardly above her. 

"You're not responsible for my problems, Okita Goro."

He could do it. He could accept this, just this once, just here. It would be so easy.

( _She smiled, not that he could see it, but he could tell._ )

Instead, he said, "Check your math again."

It was like he'd burned her. She jumped so far back Prometheus’ barrier dissipated. "Gogo…?"

No. Decidedly not. "Sorry."

She didn't stop him from going up the elevator again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if its any consolation i spent the time i would have spent formatting this on tuesday making a powerpoint about pride & prejudice & zombies. do not read pride & prejudice & zombies. grad school sucks, my friends !!! im doing my best and will do my damndest to update again 12 days from now, when i get to add the tag 'akechi sucks at yugioh'.
> 
> thank you, as always, for sticking with me!


	8. NO ONE IS LYING (part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which akechi continues his normal life, except for the fact that everyone is acting really god damn weird

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! i'm a grad student. it's plague. i apologize for my long absence nonetheless. this is a half-update (which i'm also sorry for) but i had a better idea for the second half of this chapter last night and i have no idea how long that's gonna take so i decided to put this out before anyone got really worried. 
> 
> to be honest? hifumi is my favorite.

"And is there a girlfriend _in the cards_ for you, Akechi-kun?"

"Sorry?"

The slimy TV host just grinned away.

***

Togo Hifumi played two of the Six Samurai that make up eighty percent of her decks lately and set a single card facedown. Akechi refused to give her the dignity of remembering what her cards do, so he pointed at the blue one.

“It attacks you directly for a whole—” Togo Hifumi made a show of picking the monster card up off the table, even though she knows the archetype than the back of her hand and owns miniboxes thrice over for it, “— thousand life points! Amazing, really.”

She smiled as she placed Yariza carefully back into the monster zone. He’s such a pain in the ass. Still. Akechi nodded once, dripping in a politeness feigned twice over. The pleasantries were a formality. There would be blood between them.

He glanced down at his hand. Elemental HERO had been a questionable choice— at least, with this recipe. Super Rush Headlong wouldn't save him if he couldn't draw any monsters. 

"I'm playing Pot of Greed."

Togo Hifumi took a deep breath. ( _"What, pray tell, is that?"_

 _"It lets me draw," A pause, to build suspense, "two cards."_ )

He pulled them in silence, played Clayman face down in defense mode, and ended his turn. 

"That was fortuitous."

"For whom?"

Togo Hifumi gently laid her fingertips against her face. "Me, of course. I attack with Irou."

"Is he—"

"He destroys facedown monsters."

"Super Rush H—"

"No. It skips damage calculation."

Fuck. She's right. Yariza attacked Akechi's life points directly, because there were no monsters in the way. 

"So," she said, reordering her hand, "I saw the interview. Ouch."

Ouch indeed. He had his eye on the card she was debating— smack in the middle. "Yeah. It was bad."

"I missed the pun, I think?" She set the trap down hesitantly, returned it to her hand, set it again halfway before commiting, "I'm not your Yugioh girl, am I. Go ahead."

She said it with a smirking irony. There are no cameras in church.

"Nothing like that. It's just because I've been…" Akechi performed his draw phase, managed to play Burstinatrix. "... Having my fortune told, lately."

"I foretell your demise."

"Thank you." The A-Forces lived in his hand, because it wouldn't make a difference versus another Warrior deck. She was definitely right. "Your turn. I'm so tired."

"Mm." She drew, put down another monster, God damn it—

"Are you _serious._ "

"Sucks to suck."

Akechi's life points dropped. Dropped. Dropped. Dr—

"Hey!"

"He attacks twice. That's how it works."

THE GREEN ONE. "Prove it!" he cried pointlessly. They both knew it was just petty. He’d lost.

"Geez, Akechi Goro, I've only been using this archetype for months."

"I wanted to play _chess._ "

"Then don't lose the coin toss." She gently scooped up the monsters on the field, shuffled them into one again. Akechi did the same, past the sting of the loss. "Your deck's a mess."

"Yeah."

"Don't just 'yeah' me— Why are you thinning it. Why aren’t you thinning it _enough,_ maybe? You don't need Pot of Greed, you just need to…"

She made a grabby motion. He allowed her to have it. The deck needed a judicious hand he didn't have, especially not for the Elementals. She passed through it, fast, fast, slower. She fanned them out and closed them, and again. Thinking.

"Ah. Hm. Uh. What happened to your Vision HERO thing? That one was way better."

Akechi sank into his chair. He didn't appreciate being called a copycat, a fake, or— 

"... Was it because I accused you of kinning Edo Phoenix."

— that. He resisted flinching as she tossed out Good Goblin Housekeeping. "Yes."

"Really?"

"No. It's just in my other suitcase."

Another card hit the table, facedown, much in the same way that lie hit the water. "What did you _do_ to this deck, Akechi Goro. I _know_ you own twelve copies of Mask Change."

"There aren't any in ther—"

"EXACTLY."

In contemplative silence she removed a copy of NEOS.

"Would it bother you if I said so, Togo Hifumi?"

She peered over the cards she was still holding. "If you said you were a kinnie?"

"If I said you were my girlfriend."

She barked a laugh, flipping through again. Silence stretched— he almost didn't expect an answer, knowing Togo Hifumi. Then again, knowing Togo Hifumi, she's already got a shill of a significant other or something. Unfortunate. Almost at the end of time, she threw out another deafening card.

"What, haven't picked up Frizzy yet?"

Akechi choked, betraying himself long before he was able to feign things like ignorance, heterosexuality, or taste. 

Togo Hifumi smiled. "Yeah, thought not."

"Hey!"

"Hey yourself. It's okay. They're hounding me about it, too."

Pensively, a copy of Bubbleman hit the table. He'd seen her interview, of course— Togo Hifumi had practiced the joke on him for two months before she had to use it live, delighting the interviewer in question by turning her image of the _Shogi Prince_ into the imminent _king consort._ Something something, girl power, the ticker had said. Akechi bit his tongue at the memory.

The tactic had been for emergencies, and when it played on the news he understood why the woman had addressed her as General.

( _Togo’s oblique reference to the Mandate of Heaven— gently covering up the fact that she was just another player in the middle of a savage coup at the strategy throne, was too good a byte to end on, so they’d let her go._ )

She’d smiled. It let them in. God, he hates being told his smile's nice. It only ever led to problems.

"To answer your question, though?” She tapped the corner of the cards on the table, “No."

"No?"

"I wouldn't mind. In fact, I think being your beard would be a mutually beneficial setup."

Akechi snorted. "It would be easier than asking Makoto."

"Niijima?"

"You know her?"

“Somewhat? She got me," Togo Hifumi fished her bag up from the ground, "a thing."

Akechi didn't need to see the gift. The answer hummed in the air, and even if it didn’t, he remembered this story from the other side.

( _Makoto had seen the girl at the bookstore again, picking through the antique pages like old friends, and honestly felt stupid about the whole thing, but it was too late._

_"H- hey!"_

_Togo turned around, without a flash of recognition in her eyes. This had been a mistake, but Makoto pressed the twitch out of her smile._

_"Oh, hello Niijima-san."_

_Makoto avoided flinching as one would avoid a punch— by moving. Her hand automatically swung out in front of her, stopping perhaps an inch from Togo's surprised expression._

_"I got you something!"_

_Loud._

_"Oh?"_ )

With practiced hands, Hifumi Togo took off her red hairclip and replaced it with the thing in question: a Buchimaru one.

( _Makoto hesitated, but it was already dangling from her fingers. Too late to take it back._

 _Togo was expressionless._ )

"I love it," she said, her face schooled into the careful neutrality of television. 

( _She cupped her hands under it._

 _It took an embarrassingly long time for Makoto to realize this was an acceptance._ )

"... Is she…"

Akechi smiled wryly. The blush spread across Togo Hifumi's cheeks almost instantly. It definitely hadn't surprised her, but—

"But, Makoto doesn't know it, though."

Togo Hifumi let out the breath she'd been holding in an embarrassed laugh. "Of course not. Of course. Buchimaru…"

"The rituals are intricate." Makoto had certainly broken Akechi's nose over it once, or had she? "She'd die for that thing."

“I know the type.”

Akechi felt the knowing eyes on him, as if there were something to know. Wind threatened to tear through the building— He scooped up the discarded cards, enough of them to be a deck themselves, and tucked them into his pocket for safekeeping.

"Don't make that face, Feather Yellow."

"Hey!"

She smiled, knowingly too. Akechi felt the heat spread across his cheeks— Christ.

"I'm just teasing. Kogoro."

"HEY!"

Politely, he knew, she skirted around what she's been told about Leblanc, much less what she'd managed to learn about the shitty barista _outside_ of Akechi's extensive complaining— which, of course, is the significant part. When Akechi is her friend, she doesn't date Joker. When they are best friends, bitching it out over Yugioh, she tries to take the bullet for him, instead.

A good general would know that the strategy wasn't sound from the start— Togo Hifumi, therefore, kept her mouth shut about her ill-fated results.

"I think you should meet my friend," she said, lightly stepping between traps they buried themselves, "You remind me of him."

"You have other friends?"

She drew a hand up in front of her heart, like he could wound her. "Don't be rude."

"I'm not hearing a yes."

"Yes! I do have other friends."

"Friend _s,_ several of them?"

Akechi grinned. He was being an asshole, from the porch of his glass house.

" _Y—"_ Togo Hifumi's eye twitched. " _Yes!_ "

"You hesitated."

"I hesitated. But I do associate with at least two people outside of your questionable companionship, you have my word.”

To punctuate the statement, she shuffled the revised deck and set it in front of him. Akechi took it— fifteen, twenty cards lighter at least— and shuffled it again. 

"Anyway," she said, "Maybe you should try it sometime."

"Ouch," he muttered, out of obligation more than anything else. "All of this to set up a blind date, Togo Hifumi?"

She barked a laugh. "If you think you can fight off his girlfriend, I suppose you're welcome to try."

"You'd set me up—"

"Oh, I wouldn't." She'd started a new match before Akechi realized it. "I know you're hopeless. But still… It would be nice to be nice, no?"

Akechi picked up his cards and saw monsters. Imagine that.

***

He regretted not recognizing Suzui Shiho sooner, because by the time he'd managed to place her face they were tucked away into the corner of a Big Bang Burger, her pouring a pile of french fries onto a tray from a bag she'd obviously ordered to-go.

Weird.

"Try bolting one more time," she said. It was less of a challenge and more of a prompt, an awkward edge into a conversation. Akechi could relate. 

"...And?"

"... And? I'll go up and call down a Big Bang Challenge on both our houses. And we'd feel bad about it. And embarrassed. We would be so embarrassed and there would definitely be pictures."

Akechi frowned. He hadn't been expecting her to have something in mind, much less a plague he wouldn't be able to evade. It was enough to keep him inside, where the chain of human suffering could at least produce him a normal hamburger whenever Suzui actually let him order it.

"There would definitely be pictures and," The way she bounced her foot shook the table gently, "I'd tag you on Insta."

She looked at him with honest, disinterested eyes. She'd do it.

"Okay! Okay. You have my attention, then."

If he waited for her mouth to be full of french fry before he addressed her, it was absolutely on purpose. Suzui swallowed, nodded. "So you aren't."

"Aren't?"

"Leaving."

"No." (She seemed relieved at that, hung her head in a joyless way— she must have expected him to do, what, the stupid thing? Akechi squinted.) "Did you expect otherwise?"

"Being real? Yeah."

There was no malice in it, nor deprecation. There was nothing in it at all, like a conversation about the insufferable weather. "Why?"

She shrugged, dipped another fry in… that's mayonnaise. Okay. "You don't seem very smart," Suzui said at last, "And I wasn't sure if my health and safety would be enough to stop you."

This was incredibly bold for someone he’d… never? Never. Never ever spoken to. Had he really come so far not speaking a word to Suzui? Given. It was difficult for them to meet under normal circumstances. And yet.

"What about _my_ health and safety?"

He said it sarcastically, claiming a fry for himself before going back to looking at her face. Suzui held up her hand, as if she were looking for the twins to the scars that circled Akechi's own. 

"You don't seem the type," is how she put it, coming up empty in her search. No. That's not it. 

( _He went in for another fry and she swatted at him_.)

"You seem to do a lot of seeming." Akechi muttered, half an unsure joke. There was something— 

"You're very seemly… so it only seems."

"Oh?"

"Totally. You're a real motherfucker, aren't you?" (Akechi choked on nothing, which was apparently Suzui's grinning goal.) "What, I'm kidding."

"Are you."

"Honestly? Not really." She _wasn't_ kidding, per se, and this Akechi could tell. She pointed at him with a plain fry, as if it wasn't coming off the tail of a legitimate insult. "That's why we're here."

"... In a cosmic sense…?"

If anyone else in this adventure was going to end up psychic he wanted them caught and shot now, but she laughed instead. "Ne-ga-tory. In a Big Bang Burger. This one, specifically."

"As opposed to?"

"The two we passed."

" _We_?"

"You aren't a difficult person to find."

"You were following me."

"Only so far."

"So far as what!?"

"This particular Big Bang Burger."

She'd linked arms with him and herded him inside like it was nothing. Suzui owes her life unstabbed to Chihaya, not that saying so would reduce his motherfucker quotient by anything. "Oh my God."

"Speaking of," (At this, Suzui turned to her backpack, sitting half-open on the seat next to her,) "Maybe you can help me with something while we wait."

Akechi was silenced by the french-fry hill she was intending to die on, obviously already delivered to the table. He had no idea what they'd be waiting for. She accepted this confusion, more likely than not, as compliance.

"I feel like you're the kind of guy who causes problems on purpose."

"Not really."

"If it's an accident, then that's talent."

"I appreciate—"

"Have you ever had a dream you died?"

"Excuse me?"

"Ever dream you died?" It was a question that had an answer built into it. "Right."

"Uh hunh."

"They say," she said, fishing out a notebook and casually flipping through it like she wasn't leading him through this conversation by the nose, "If you dream you fall, and you don't wake up before you hit the ground—"

Akechi knows how this goes, and how it usually goes for her. "It's bad luck," he finished hopefully, idly pulling a napkin from the holder to his left.

"It's worse, but I appreciate that."

She got where she was going, in the pages of her thing, but didn't show him. Akechi took the opportunity to look at her— really, really look, but she was fine. Perfectly fine, in ideal health, without any of the pavement smeared on her. A stab of guilt caught Akechi in the shoulder as he shoved the napkin in his pocket.

He'd assumed that was a fixed point. 

Takamaki had obviously managed otherwise— once she was able, she'd been willing, and she'd bent time with her own two hands for Suzui Shiho the moment she 

( _remembered_ )

Suzui slammed the notebook shut. "Nevermind."

"Hunh?"

"Nevermind, I said. The man of the hour has arrived."

Akechi turned around in his seat and followed Suzui's gaze to… one of the people in the establishment, presumably. He didn't recognize anyone at all. "Whom?"

Something crunched suspiciously like a bag of fries being crammed into a backpack.

"You'll see."

"But I haven't eaten."

She was standing at his side, which was the best indication that the lion's share of stupidity was about to move to a secondary location.

"You will."

***

The secondary location that they arrived to was, miraculously, unknown to Akechi. Some kind of anonymous apartments in an anonymous part of town.

"Is this his?"

Whichever NPC it had been that they'd tailed for all of two minutes, before Suzui had declared he was taking the long way. She smiled. "No."

Before Akechi could ask, she knocked shave-and-a-haircut, and the door was opened. Of course Akechi didn't know this apartment— _how_ would he when, apparently, it was Sakamoto's door to answer? 

He wasn't expecting them. The greeting died on his lips a syllable in and left Sakamoto caught mouth-open, like he'd catch something instead. The moment passed, and suddenly every emotion known to Sakamoto's presumably limited repertoire started fighting for dominance on his face. If the briefly overwhelming smell of peaches was anything to go by, the urge to crush him with Seiten Tensei had a strong hat in the ring.

However, the winner (among everything— confusion, undelight, confusion again) was the small, guilty smile he gave Suzui Shiho. "What's up, Zu?"

He shifted and leaned against the doorway as if someone had shouted to ACT NATURAL, and as if Akechi wasn't even there. It was classier than many alternatives. Akechi still had it in him to be offended. 

"Scoot," Suzui commanded before either of them could make assholes of themselves in direct dialogue. 

Sakamoto suppressed a wince, if badly. Akechi would have criticized it more if someone else, obviously not present company, hadn't cut through the moment.

"Oh, fuck _me._ "

The voice was unfamiliar too. Akechi turned to see… a person, behind them, in the hallway. People hadn't been impressed to see Akechi Goro in a long time. Outright _annoyed_? 

"Yo. You gotta bad tail, Yuuki."

Yuuki— who? — pressed the palm of his hand into his eye. "It's not a tail if they got here first. Excuse me."

With the hand holding the— oh, the Big Bang Burger bag, the newcomer passed between Akechi and Suzui, and was admitted to the Sakamoto apartment with no further obstructions. Sakamoto himself grimaced— defeat— and wordlessly beckoned Suzui and Akechi to follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you, as always, for sticking with me. i appreciate you, stay safe, i'll be back once i figure out how to make ao3 do fancier things.
> 
> also, i really miss playing yugioh.


End file.
